EFFECTS OF RAILROAD RATE- MAKING 1 89 



the purpose of making inferior places equal to the principal export city. 

 How much this is cannot be estimated with any degree of accuracy. It 

 is certainly enormous. 



It is true that the constitution guarantees that the government of the 

 United States shall not do anything that will give one port an advantage 

 over another. The purpose of this clause in our constitution is to pro- 

 vide that property shall be protected in those places which nature has 

 fitted to be the chief seaports of the country. It was the aim of the 

 constitution-makers that there should be no discriminating duties levied 

 against any port and in favor of any other port. The constitution 

 strives in this way to assure the equaUty of competition upon which 

 theory our government rests. In thus attempting to guarantee that there 

 shall be no discrimination against one port as compared with another, it 

 was hoped that only the forces of nature which are over and above 

 human control were to be allowed to have free play, and those ports that 

 were most favored by nature would become the greatest places of export. 

 The fathers sought therefore to keep from the new government 

 they were making the power to interfere with the natural growth of the 

 various ports. It is unreasonable to assume that they thought Congress 

 should not have the power to prevent individuals from destroying this 

 very clause which they in their wisdom thought fit to insert in the funda- 

 mental law of the new government. Nor is it to be thought that in mak- 

 ing this clause they believed that the natural advantages which any one port 

 might possess should be destroyed by a company of individuals. When 

 the differential rate on freight from the West to the seaboard is main- 

 tained in such a way as to prevent the trade going to the principal port of 

 entry, it is an interference with the conditions established by nature and 

 favoring the growth of seaports. Such a differential can make new sea- 

 port cities. In 1890 the population of Newport News, the terminal of the 

 Chesapeake and Ohio, was 4,449; in 1900 it was 19,635 — an increase 

 of over 450 per cent. 



The least expensive way for the United States to get its grain to the 

 ships was formerly to take it to the harbor of New York. But the dif- 

 ferential has changed this. By raising the price paid for hauhng, it is now 

 as easy to take the grain to various other seaports. That is, the people of 



