ssion and corrected by the companies.
Moreover, the annual reports of the commission, not to mention its very
excellent statistical data, diffuse much useful information and dispel
many delusions. Thus the fourth annual report of the commission says:

"A stranger to the law might infer, from some public
addresses and pamphlets which have assumed to discuss this
subject, that the railroad companies were prohibited from
carrying the necessities of life over long distances at very
low rates, unless their rates on other subjects of
transportation for shorter distances were made to
correspond. Indeed, instances have been pointed out in which
it was said that certain articles of commerce could not now
be transported for long distances, because, by reason of
this provision, they would not bear the charges that must
under compulsion of law be imposed upon them. Among such
instances has been mentioned the granite industry of New
England, as to which it has been said that valuable
manufactories have ceased to be profitable because it has
now become impossible for the proprietors to obtain from
the railroad companies the nominal rates for the
transportation of their products which they formerly
enjoyed, since it is now, by the long and short haul clause,
made criminal for the companies to give such rates.

"A complaint of this nature is not to be met by argument,
because it is baseless in point of fact. The instance
mentioned may safely be assumed to be chosen rather from
regard to the need of an attack upon the law than from any
belief in the justice of its application. The prohibition of
the fourth section, so far as concerns this article of
commerce, or any other that can be named, will have no
application whatever until it is made to appear that
elsewhere upon the lines of the road conveying it there is
property of the same kind, for transportation by the same
carriers in the same direction, upon which the carriers are
disposed to making greater charges in the aggregate for the
shorter hauls.

"The wheat of the extreme West, it is also said, can no
longer have the nominal rates which were formerly made for
transportation to the seaboard, but this assertion is also
without point or applicability, unless it is s