Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/200

190 barrel of flour produced in the United States, and directly affects the price to producer and consumer of these important commodities.

The preceding table shows the average wheat rate from Chicago to New York, the average export price as compiled by the Bureau of Statistics, and the number of bushels which could be shipped between those points for a sum equal to the export price during each of the years named.

This table shows that the reduction in rates has been considerably in excess of that in the price of wheat, and the same is probably true of the other cereal products and of flour.

The rates charged on the artificial fertilizers so largely used on the cotton plantations of the south are of great importance to the producers of that section. Taking that from Charleston, S. C, to Albany, Ga., as an example, it is found to have been reduced from $4.30 per ton in 1884 to $2.59 in 1894. Equally important changes have taken place in the rates on the product itself, cotton being now shipped from Memphis to Boston via rail for fifty-five and a half cents per one hundred pounds, a reduction of about thirty per cent from the rate in force during 1880, which was seventy-nine cents.

Nearly every one is familiar with the importance of the livestock movement from the southwest to Chicago. Shipments of live cattle are concentrated at the railway centers on the Missouri River and are carried forward to destination in train loads. The rate per car load from 1877 to July, 1881, was $67.50. It was then reduced to $60, but was advanced to $65, remaining at that figure from 1883 to 1887. It is now twenty-three and a half cents per hundred pounds, which is equivalent to $56.40 per car load. The rate on packed meats from Cincinnati to New York city averaged seventy-one and a quarter cents per hundred pounds during 1867; during 1877 the average was 31·93 cents; during 1887, 27·12 cents; and during 1893, 25·43 cents.

Turning to passenger traffic, it is found that the tendency toward increased speed and improved facilities has operated as a limitation upon reductions in charges, though by no means wholly preventing them. The earliest available data give the average charge per passenger per mile during the year 1880 as 2·51 cents, which is higher than any subsequent year. The average for 1893 was 1·976 cents, and the saving upon the traffic of that year over what the public would have paid at the higher rates of 1880 amounted to $80,568,025.

Numerous reductions equal to those given could be cited and to enumerate them all would require a statement showing rates between practically all railway stations and upon nearly every article commonly offered for shipment by rail. As such a mass