THIRTY-THIRD BIENNIAL SESSION 
23I 
loaded to the required minimum, the amount of deterioration will some- 
times knock the profit from the whole car. We need some greater elasticity 
in our minimum car-lot regulations. There is no reason why peaches should 
be shipped under the same minimum car-lot weight as less perishable com- 
modities. It is a fact that the minimum car-lot on cabbages is the same for 
most of the territory as for cotton, which is absolutely imperishable in an 
ordinary sense. 
A friend who has recently written a book on the matter of transporta- 
tion wrote me a letter telling of a case that came to his attention relating 
to two shipments of butter, one from Vermont to Boston, and the other from 
Nebraska to Boston. The distance from Vermont to Boston was so short, 
and it was in the fall, that the railroad (the Boston & Maine, I think) 
decided that a refrigerator car was not necessary and the butter was 
loaded into an ordinary car for shipment to Boston. The weather turned 
very warm (you will remember that in October a year ago it was very 
warm), the car met with unusual and unexplainable delays and the ship- 
ment reached Boston in a decidedly soft condition, so that it had to be 
sold for a number of cents per pound below the normal market for that 
class of butter. This shipper, in investigating the matter, traced a Ne- 
braska shipment in which the distance was so great that the railroad fur- 
nished a refrigerator car without thinking of the possibility of handling it 
in any other manner, and got the product to Boston in fine shape and topped 
the market. The astonishing thing to the Vermont shipper was that he 
found the freight rate from Nebraska to Boston was very little different 
from the rate from his shipping station in Vermont to Boston. It indi- 
cates another class of problems which we face in handling our marketing 
situation. 
The problem is not the same, as you well know, with reference to all of 
the products. I just brought along a tabulation, from which I want to quote 
about three or four cases of the sort of things that arise. For instance, 
on a certain shipment of grape-fruit from Cuba to Boston, the producer 
received $2.75 per box containing four dozen. The consumer paid at the 
rate of $6 per box. The difference between the two was $3.25 per box on 
this grape-fruit — over and above what the producer received. The freight 
was 60 cents, which I think we must agree is reasonable; the duty was 
65 cents, which was unnecessary; the hauling, supplying, miscellaneous 
expenses and losses $2, including the retailer’s profit. The producer, you 
will remember, got $2.75 for it, after assuming all of the hazards for a 
year (for the particular crop year, as well as the hazards for the years that it 
took to bring his orchards into bearing), he got very little more for his 
trouble, hazards, and everything else, than the retailer got for keeping 
the material in his possession as much as a week. I think that sort of 
commodities do not usually remain in their possession more than that 
length of time. 
Here is a case of two shipments of hay, one from Pomfret, Conn., to 
Boston, for which the producer received $25 per ton and for which the con- 
sumer paid $32 per ton, a difference of $7. The wholesaler’s charges and 
profits were $3.50 and the retailer’s $3.50. Compared with the grape-fruit 
case, the margin is very much smaller; but, considering the nature of the 
