Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/609

Rh average rate of cost of the entire traffic, they are never knowingly less than the cost of carriage of the particular traffic.

These several causes requiring discrimination between places, viz., parallel roads or water-routes, competition of markets, and the efforts of the railroad to increase its profit by increasing its traffic at lower rates, are, in the popular mind, considered without distinction; the discrimination is as to through or local traffic. This distinction is in accord with the usual result, for through points are, in nearly all cases, the places where the most active competition of all kinds is in force. The usual termini of railroads are large cities; these again are usually on water-courses, and are usually also the chief markets reached by the road. But such is not always the case, and, when it is not, the rates will be found to be modified in accordance with the number of these forms of competition there in force, and the greater or less strength with which they exist.

This general classification of the traffic into through and local suggests a further reason why the competitive rates might fairly be expected to be lower than the local. Through points—the termini of the road—afford the longest haul, and traffic carried a long distance is, like that carried in large quantities, at a lower rate of cost per mile than that carried shorter distances. The traffic between terminal stations is usually much greater than that between any other two stations; cars are therefore loaded to their full capacity. The load at the end of the long haul is discharged, and with a delay of perhaps a day may be loaded again and returned. The local traffic is in small quantities, the car is but partly loaded, or if fully loaded the delay in unloading is as great as though it went through to the terminal station. The way-station, in the large majority of cases, affords no return load, so that the haul to some station where the car is needed, as well as the delay caused thereby, must be added to the expense. Add to these differences the difference in the volume of the traffic, and it will be readily seen that the cost per mile on through can not be but a fraction of what it is on local traffic.

Although the constant play of these competitive forces results in reducing through rates to a very low point, it deserves to be noticed that in local rates there is as well a constant though less rapid tendency to reduction. Wherever no more active forces of competition are in operation, the effort on the part of the railroad to develop the production and resources of the country by stimulating rates, and so increasing the profits and the value of the property of the company, is a cause which works constantly toward reductions. This fact is illustrated by the Railroad Commissioners of Iowa, who, in their report for 1881, occupy forty-six pages with tables and statements showing the reductions in rates in that State, and in which they particularly call attention to the fact that "the reduction is not confined to the through traffic; it applies, in a somewhat smaller ratio, it is true, to