Effect of Pools on Rates. 
69 
tariff rates are always as high as any rates charged, and second, 
they are more closely adhered to during a period of pooling 
than under unrestricted competition. Now, both of these facts 
would tend to exaggerate the results that I have arrived at. 
They would tend to make the rates appear higher under unre¬ 
stricted competition than they really were, and vice versa. 
But, as has been so often said, the question of rates is not so 
much one of high versus low rates as of steady uniform rates 
opposed to fluctuations and discriminations. And it is just at 
this point that the advocates of the pooling policy claim their 
greatest strength. They say that when a pool has once fixed 
the rates it requires the consent of a large number of roads to 
change them, and hence when once fixed they tend to be per¬ 
manent. But the result of this is rather a change in the char¬ 
acter of the fluctuations than a disappearance of the evil. The 
fluctuations, instead of occurring continually and from day to 
day, occur only at long intervals, but are then much more 
violent. The pool maintains rates for some time at a fixed point 
and then there is a long and disastrous rate war. These wars 
are usually much worse than those that occur under a purely com¬ 
petitive regime, because owing to the result of the pooling policy 
the roads are in a prosperous condition at its beginning, and 
then they are animated by a feeling of animosity that is seldom 
found save at the breaking up of a pool. And finally, in addi¬ 
tion to usual incentives for obtaining traffic, there is the added 
one of a hope of obtaining a better percentage in the pool which 
all know will be the final outcome of the struggle. 
But rates may be changed in other ways than by a direct 
revision of rate schedules. They may be equally affected, though 
in a less evident manner, through changes in classification. The 
influence of the classification upon the height, stability and 
uniformity of rates is so great that anything affecting it is of 
paramount importance in any discussion of the rate question. 4 
4 Mr. F. B. Thurber, wholesale grocer of New York City, said in his 
testimony before an investigation of the Interstate Commerce Com¬ 
mission in 1890 : “ The question of classification goes to the very bottom 
of the rate-making power. If it be true that he who makes the songs of 
a country may care but little who makes its laws, it is doubly true that 
