Ellendale, Minnesota. September 25, 2008.

Q. (By Mr. Conger). How do your prices compare on the line of road you operate on in relation to distance from this market? Do you pay as much for the grain at the farthest point as you do at a nearer point? – A. No, not exactly; but the railroads in the tariff rates for a long distance will haul grain pretty close the local. The long haul is what you are after.

Q. Then you pay approximately as much for grain 1,000 miles as 300 miles from Chicago? – A. Yes. look at the fish industry at Fairhaven. We can ship fish from Puget Sound to Boston as the same rate as we can ship to Chicago. That is on account of these proportionate rates. Now, I have always complained about these proportionate rates, because I do not think they are right. You can start to-day a train of 50 carloads of grain; you can have in that 50-carload train 25 carloads destined to Chicago, and I will have 25 cars billed through; on the same train; identically the same service performed. When it gets to Chicago, you say, “Mr. Counselman, I wish you would clean that grain for me.” “All right,” I clean it. I put it out on the eastern train, and these other 25 cars come in and make up the eastern train of 50 cars. Twenty-five cars will pay, say, 38 cents on to New York; the other grain, that you had cleaned here, will pay a 40-cent rate. Now, they have performed identically the same service, but charge you the additional rate simply because you did not bill it through.

Excerpted from a testimony by Charles Counselman, a grain and stock merchant in Chicago, on November 17, 1899, as recorded in Report of the Industrial Commission on Transportation, Volume IV. Printed by the Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1900.