mpetition at the intervening places the rates at
these points were kept up, and sometimes, it was charged, were raised
in order to compensate for losses at the terminals. Thus resulted that
anomaly which strikes so strangely the investigator of the railroad
problem--that rates apparently have no relation to the distance covered,
and that the charge for hauling a load for seventy-five miles may be
actually higher than that for hauling the same load one hundred or one
hundred and fifty miles. The expert, looking back upon nearly a hundred
years of railroad history, may now satisfactorily explain this curious
circumstance; but it is not surprising that the farmer of the early
seventies, overburdened with debt and burning his own corn for fuel
because he could not pay the freight exacted for hauling it to market,
saw in the system, only an attempt to plunder. Yet even the shippers
at terminal points had their grievances, for the competition at these
points became so savage and so ruinous that the roads soon entered
into agreements fixing rates or formed "pools." In accordance with
this latter arrangement, all business was put into a common pot, as
the natural property of the roads constituting the pool; it was then
allotted to different lines according to a percentage agreement, and the
profits were divided accordingly. As the purpose of rate agreements
and pools was to stop competition and to keep up prices, it is hardly
surprising that they were not popular in the Communities which they
affected. The circumstance that, after solemnly entering into pools,
the allied roads would frequently violate their agreements and cut rates
surreptitiously merely added to the general confusion.

The early seventies were not a time of great prosperity in the newly
opened West, and the farmers, looking about for the source of their
discomforts, not unnaturally fixed upon the railroads. Their period of
discontent coincided with what will always be known in American history
as "the Granger movement." In its origin this organization apparently
had no relation to the dissatisfaction which its leaders afterward so
successfully capitalized. Its founder, Oliver Hudson Kelley, at the time
when he started the fraternity was not even a farmer but a clerk in
the Agricultural Bureau at Washington. Afterward, when the Grangers
had become an agrarian force to be feared, if not respected, it was
a popular jest to refer to the originators of this great fa