nd fifty-six were delivered to
individual shippers. In other words, the coal company owned in large
part by the railway and its officials was given eighty-two per cent.
of all the facilities to get coal to market, although the other
shippers had much greater combined capacity than had the Rogers Coal
Company.

During the last four months of the period named, and when the
Pittsburg Coal Company had the plant, force, and capacity to load
thirty cars per day, they received an average of one and a fourth cars
per day, resulting, as was intended, in the utter ruin of a
prosperous business and the involuntary sale of the property, while
the railway coal company, the railway officials, and the accommodating
friends who operated the Rogers Coal Company, made vast sums of money;
and when all other shippers had thus been driven off the line the
price of coal was advanced to the consumer.

On another railway, traversing the same coal-field, the railway or its
officials became interested in the Keith & Perry Coal Company--the
largest coal company doing business on the line--and here the plan
seems to have been, in addition to the manipulation of rates, to
starve other mine operators out, and force them to sell their coal to
the Keith & Perry Company, by failing to furnish the needed cars to
those who did not sell their coal to the Keith & Perry Company at a
very low price.

When the Keith & Perry Company had a great demand for coal, such
parties as sold the product of their mines to that company were
furnished with cars, but for the other operators cars were not to be
had, such cars as were brought to the field being assigned to such
parties as were loading to the Keith & Perry Company, because that
company furnished the coal consumed by the locomotives of the railway.

One operator, after being for years forced in this way to sell his
product to the Keith & Perry Company, or see his several plants stand
idle, has, in recent months, been obliged to build some seven miles of
railway in order to reach four different roads, and thus have a
fighting chance for cars, although all these railways are provided
with coal mines owned by the corporations or their officials.

In Arkansas, Jay Gould, or his railway company, own coal mines and the
coal is transported to the neighboring town at low rates, and there is
an ample supply of cars for such mines; but the owners of an adjoining
mine are forced to haul their coal some eighteen mile