THE FARMER'S WAR AGAINST MONOPOLIES. 369 



be, and that there are " rings " connected with some of 

 them which are increasing the cost of running the roads 

 for their own benefit/ continued Mr. Smith. ' It 

 is generally hard to discover just where the swindle 

 is, because when the officers of a road manage it so that 

 the dividends come regularly, the stockholders are not 

 often very watchful over them. Sometimes, however, 

 we get hold of a fact. Now here is the Burlington & 

 Quincy road, which has in Kewanee a patent shoot for 

 coal. It takes at this point forty tons a day. The 

 miner will sell me coal at the bank for seven cents a 

 bushel that is, $1.75 a ton. He carts it a mile and 

 delivers it in the railroad shoot for eleven cents a 

 bushel, or $2.75 a ton. He pays one cent a bushel, or 

 twenty-five cents a ton, for carting. This leaves seventy- 

 five cents a ton, or $30 a day, on the amount delivered, 

 which the miner charges the railroad company buying 

 coal at wholesale in excesa of what he charges me, when 

 I buy by the single ton. Now there must be some cat 

 under that meal. Again, I met, recently, a gentleman 

 w^ho is engaged in coal mining in Indiana. He told me 

 that a shaft had been opened a few rods from one of the 

 branches of this Burlington road, and, having agreed 

 with the owner to take his coal at $1.25 a ton, he went 

 to the railroad company to arrange for its .transporta- 

 tion. A few miles further down the road was another 

 mine, and he thought he ought to have rates similar to 

 those the company mining there had. The general 

 freight agent refused to supply him with any cars at all 

 I suppose he pretended not to have them. An 

 investigation showed that at the old mine the railroad 

 company was paying $1.75 a ton for coal fifty cents a 

 ton more than it was worth there and there are strong 

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