94 HISTORY OF THE GRANGE MOVEMENT; OR, 



Rates would no longer have varied with every season 

 and to every city; points destitute of competition would 

 not have been plundered, as they now habitually are, 

 that competing points might be supplied for nothing. 

 During the summer of 1870, accordingly, many towns 

 in New England were charged upon Western freights 

 heavily in advance of the sums charged for carrying 

 the same freights on the same roads a hundred or two 

 miles farther on. All because the farther point was 

 served at a loss to the carrier, and, therefore, the nearer 

 had to pay the road profits for both, besides replacing 

 the loss. The agents of the roads do not seek to deny 

 this ; they acknowledge and defend it. They say, and 

 say truly: 'We must live. If our through business is 

 done at a loss (and they show that it was done for 

 nothing), then our local business must pay for all/ 

 This was the case in New England. The cities of cen- 

 tral New York fared no better. During a war of rates, 

 almost any manufactured article will be carried from 

 the seaboard to the West for perhaps one half of the 

 amount charged for carrying the article there from a 

 semi-interior point. So also as regards Eastern freights. 

 Syracuse, Rochester, and the like class of cities can 

 neither compete on equal terms with Boston in the 

 markets of the West, nor with Chicago in those of the 

 East. The discrimination against them is said to 

 amount in certain cases to ten per cent, of the whole 

 value of the article transported. Neither, under the 

 competing system, is there any remedy for this evil, 

 and a consciousness of this fact, of the risk to which 

 they are continually exposed, has caused the breaking 

 up of many manufacturing establishments at interior 

 points." 



