Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/611

Rh in the West is carried to Chicago or St. Louis entirely by car-loads, and is forwarded thence by the train-load. Coal, petroleum, and provisions in some cases afford a regular traffic by the train-load. These articles being carried in large quantities are, as has been shown, carried at a much less rate of cost than things shipped in small quantities. The cost of the service thus bears an approximate relation to the rate of charge. Again, the volume of the traffic is a cause of discrimination, if by reducing the rate the traffic can be sufficiently increased to produce a greater net profit. And, again, it follows that the rate of cost decreases with the reduced rate of charge. In the reduction to meet the competition of other lines to the same market, the discrimination is also made to get the traffic which could not otherwise be secured. And the result, again, is a reduction in the rate of cost of the service by the greater traffic usual to those markets or centers of industry which are favored by the discriminating rate.

Indeed, it has sufficiently appeared that all discriminations arc made to increase traffic, and those things and places are favored most which furnish the largest traffic. Now, as a larger traffic is carried at a less rate of cost, it follows that there is a constant and fundamental relation between the cost of the service and the rate of charge. There is, in fact, as close a relation as it is possible to establish between them by any system but one which would be prohibitory to a great portion of the traffic. The mileage basis of rates, however, has and continues to find many advocates, yet its impracticability has been so often illustrated that but brief mention of it seems here to be called for. Where all circumstances of value, cost, competition, and quantity are equal, a mileage rate is now applied by railroads, only reducing the rate per mile gradually as the length of haul increases, thus making the rate conform more nearly to the cost of service than if the same rate per mile were applied for all distances. This is as near as it is practicable to apply the principle, and is the rule so far as my information extends on all American roads, as it is also on European roads, operated both by private corporations and by governments. But where the circumstances of cost, competition, quantity, and value are different, that is, for the greater portion of the traffic, the principle would result in prohibition. From the preceding pages this result appears to me so apparent as to need no further comment. A statement before me, however, of an impartial and informed body (the select Committee of the Parliament of Great Britain on fares and rates of 1882), is so clear and forcible an exposition of this point, and at the same time affords an illustration of much that has herein been said on the subject of discrimination in general, that I am led to make from it the following quotation: "The form which the proposal for a fixed standard of charges has usually taken is equal mileage, i. e., a charge for each class of goods and passengers in proportion to the distance for which they are carried." This point was strongly urged before the Royal