EXCESSIVE CHARGES IN TENNESSEE AND IOWA. 401 



signee to do better. A Tennessee farmer writes the Prairie 

 farmer that he is charged seven cents a bushel on corn, 

 transported by the car load, twenty-six miles to Nashville. 

 This is nine cents per ton per mile, or at least nine times 

 the cost. 



Suel Foster, of Muscatine, Iowa, a gentleman well and 

 favorably known among our Iowa fruit growers, was charged 

 the same or a higher rate for three times the distance. On 

 bulky and cheap products, such as corn in a productive 

 season, hay, oats, etc., the rates are often, in many places, 

 prohibitory. 



According to Poor, there were carried in the United 

 States, in 1872, not less than two hundred million tons of 

 freight, at a charge to the producer and consumer, in round 

 numbers, of three hundred and forty million dollars. As 

 suming this freight to have been carried at the moderate 

 charge of fifty per cent above cost, the railway companies 

 levied a tax for transportation of more than one hundred 

 and twelve million dollars, on the people of the United 

 States, over and above the necessity of the case. 



Transportation is simply a necessary evil in the case of 

 freight. It adds nothing to the feeding power of grain, the 

 warming power of coal, or the clothing capacity of cotton; 

 and all charges levied for profit, over and above a fair rate 

 of interest on the amount actually invested in transporta 

 tion, is contrary to the public interest, and, in many locali 

 ties, crushes out enterprise and prosperity. 



SELF-INTEREST THE RAILWAY RULE OF ACTION. 



Not only, however, is the railway an expensive necessity, 

 which farmers near a market learn to discard, although it 

 could serve them also to mutual advantage, but the railway 



