SEVENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK-PART III. 113 



But now, gentlemen, it isn't a simple thing to do. It isn't an easy 

 thing to do to publish a schedule of that kind. Now, I will give you 

 a few figures. There are 25,000 railroad stations in the United States — 

 a little more, but we will call it 25,000. Now, to make one rate — say the 

 first-class rate — between these 25,000 stations would require 312,500,000 

 rates. Just think of that— 312,500,000 rates! Now, there are 8,000 

 articles, in round numbers, that are shipped by railroads. Now, if they 

 were going to make a rate for each one of those 8,000 articles it would 

 require 2,000,500,000,000 of rates, which if printed in ordinary style would 

 make 6G6,666 volumes the size of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, which 

 would fill to the roof more than 100 of the largest sized box cars. To post 

 two sets in each station house, in the manner required by the law, 

 would require a library building attached to each station larger than 

 the Congressional Library building at Washington. 



Now then, to accomplish this enormous problem we have got to resort 

 to method and system. Well, of course, we don't publish a rate for 

 every article that is shipped. We have a classification by which we 

 group these articles that are shipped, and those articles that we think 

 ought to bear first-class we mark first-class, and so on. 



The roads in the West some fifty years ago grouped all these articles 

 Into ten classes, Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, and letters A, B, C, D and E. Well 

 now, that tremendously simplified it. It reduced the number of volumes, 

 if I think right, and I figured it out somewhere, to about 800. Well, 

 that classification did very well in the moderate commerce and the com- 

 paratively few articles that were shipped by rail fifty years ago when 

 that was made, but in more modern commerce, the extension of trade 

 and different articles coming in, they had to have a finer classification 

 than that, so, instead of changing the classification, we got to issuing 

 commodity tariffs. That is, we would issue separate tariffs for brick, 

 and a separate tariff for hay, and a separate tariff for commodities, until 

 we have got up to 800 of these, and that gets us back to a library of 

 64,800 books the size of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. Well, that 

 would not be any use, you know. No man could look through 64,800 

 volumes to find his rate. We have to get more system than that. 



Well now, I have been studying this thing. We had a meeting down 

 at Washington before the Interstate Commerce Commission, and a lot 

 of fifty-thousand-dollar salary fellows there that represented big rail- 

 roads. They said, "We would like to do this if we could;" and I, like 

 an idiot or enthusiast, as I am, I said, "I believe it can be done; I 

 believe it is possible to systematize these things and adopt methods by 

 which we can publish practically all of the rates — all of the joint rates 

 between different railroads, which carries very much the largest volume 

 of business — I think we can get that into a book — one book, the size of 

 Webster's Unabridged Dictionary." Well, everybody said it was impos- 

 sible. It was a sort of a random shot. I hadn't made much calculation 

 about it, but said I thought I could. Well, the Commission says: "If you 

 think you can do it, we wish you would do it, and show us how it can be 

 done." So I have been at work on that problem for several months, and 



