420 THE GROUNDSWELL. 



maintain, the steamboats with their capacious barges can 

 move cheaper than any railroad cari, bat not so cheap as to 

 leave no profit whatever to the railroad if it carries freight 

 at the rate thus fixed by the river. Is it not clearly better 

 for the people of Springfield, or any intermediate station, 

 that the company should take the produce and merchandise 

 from St. Louis to Chicago at a profit of one cent or even 

 one-half cent .per bushel (provided that is the largest profit 

 the rate fixed by the river will allow), and thus be enabled to 

 do the local business a trifle cheaper than it would otherwise 

 be forced to demand, if the whole burden of paying the in 

 terest on the cost of the road were thrown upon the local 

 business ? Were all the traffic of the several roads to be 

 done on the low basis of the river rates, the railroads could 

 not be maintained; nor would any one have been rash 

 enough to build our railroads had they expected to do all 

 the business at the prices fixed by the river. It was just 

 because there was no navigable river running across the 

 State that the prairie was almost unoccupied until the rail 

 roads were built. If the companies are not to be permitted 

 to get from the river business whatever profit they can, un 

 der existing circumstances, there seems no other way than 

 to forego that business, and let the local business pay all the, 

 expenses of the road. This statement is likely to call out 

 the query: &quot;How is it, if you can afford to do a particular 

 item of business at a low rate, you can not afford to do all at 

 the same price?&quot; Precisely for the same reason that a 

 farmer can not afford to have a bad crop on every acre of 

 his land ; though it would not seriously affect him to have a 

 bad crop on one acre, if there were many acres of good crops; 

 and he would generally prefer to have a bad crop on the one 

 acre rather than have no crop at all. 



The law discriminates in another way that is flagrantly 



