SEVENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART III. Ill 



"How do you determine what the rates are?" 



"Well," says he, "I have a clerk that has these tariffs in charge. He 

 has them sorted out and filed, and," says he, "when I want to know a 

 rate, why, I ask the clerk, and he tells me, and I suppose that is the 

 legal rate, and so it goes." He says, "I don't mean to say by that I don't 

 know the most common rates — the rates on wheat, on grain to Chicago, 

 and the rates on live stock — those common commodities that are ship- 

 ping all the time. Of course, I know where to find those." But with the 

 great multitude of commodities that are shipped on railroads he didn't 

 know what to do. 



Well, Judge Cooley looked at the other commissioners, and he looked 

 at the commissioners on this side of him, and he motioned to one of them, 

 and they got their heads together, and the judge turned around, and, 

 says he: 



"Gentlemen, the Commission has got an appointment tomorrow, and 

 I see this is going to be rather a long job," and, says he, "we will adjourn 

 until some day to be fixed hereafter. We will notify you." 



He never fixed the date thereafter. 



Well, the second public attempt — you might say public attempt — which 

 I made was just before the taking effect of this present law. I attended 

 a meeting of traffic officials and railroad officials in Chicago, to advise 

 together and see if we could come to an understanding of what the law 

 meant. Of course, all laws have to be construed. No law is so absolutely 

 plain that there are no diificulties about it; and the meeting was called 

 to order, and three or four traffic officials cracked some conundrums 

 about whether a rate that was made in Shanghai ought to be published 

 In Shanghai or San Francisco, or somewhere else, and it didn't seem to 

 me to be getting along very fast, and I said: "It seems to me, gentle- 

 men, the more important question is to know whether we can publish 

 our rates in such a way that a person of ordinary understanding can tell 

 by an inspection of the schedules what they are." Well, they didn't do 

 a thing to me but practically kick me out of the room. They immediately 

 got up — somebody got up and moved that the meeting adjourn and a 

 committee be appointed to consider all these things. 



Then I went to Washington to the Interstate Commerce Commission, 

 and I appealed to them. I says: "Now, here; this law says that you 

 shall make a schedule; you shall print it; you shall publish it. If you 

 want to change it, you shall either reprint it with the changes in it, or 

 you shall get at the schedules that are already printed and make it appear 

 on that. Now," says I, "instead of doing that, whenever they want to 

 change, they file another tariff which they call an amendment, and change 

 one or two rates here and one or two rates there, and in a few days 'more 

 they will file another amendment and another amendment and another 

 amendment, so that in the course of time if you got hold of any schedule 

 and you wanted to know what the rate was, you get at the original 

 schedule, you will find one rate, and then if you hunted through 7,000 

 or 8,000 tariffs you would find that there had been amendment No. 1; 

 you might find No. 2; you might find No. 3; you might find No. 4; and 

 I have known as many as one hundred amendments to a single tariff. 



