THE STORY OF THE NONPARTISAN LEAGUE 



just, untruthful, and sometimes illegal or 

 criminal devices were used to augment this 

 revenue; the pressure of the always-increasing 

 capitalization left no other course open to 

 the managers, no matter how good men they 

 might otherwise be. They, too, had inheri- 

 ted a system and a machine to which they 

 were as much the appendages as the whistle 

 is an appendage of a locomotive and with 

 which they could do nothing except go along 

 and move up the rates as the capitalization 

 soared. 



For these reasons the freight charges on 

 that shipment of wheat were exorbitant and 

 absurd. From Jason to Minneapolis, they 

 were, roughly speaking, something like five 

 cents ^ a bushel more than a Canadian grain- 

 grower would have paid for wheat hauled the 

 same distance. 



But the wheat arrived in Minneapolis and 

 stood one morning on a side-track. An in- 

 spector of the Minnesota State Warehouse 

 Commission now came to examine and grade 

 it. He carried with him an implement re- 

 sembling a big tin dart. This he stuck into 

 a corner of one car, clicked a spring, and 

 brought up some wheat. He thought he 

 saw moisture in the grain and decided it to 



* Taking as a basis the average wheat production of a North 

 Dakota farm, a toll of five cents a bushel on its produce would 

 amount, in twenty-one years, at compound interest, to $20,000. 



38 



