Chapter VII: Part 7

Beginning, so far as I am informed, with Mr. Hill’s livestock activities, and the aid of Mr. J. W. Kendrick to the great dry farming movement, railway aid to agriculture has grown to a fashion. The Pennsylvania maintains its demonstration farms on Long Island; the New York Central strives to bring back to their old-time headship in farming the Empire State’s half-abandoned farms. Scarcely a railway system can be mentioned which has not run its educational trains for the purpose of bringing agricultural science into touch with the farmers along its line. “Dairy specials,” “corn specials,” “bacon specials,” “fruit specials,” and dozens of other special trains have moved leisurely from station to station with agricultural lecturers aboard and cars fitted up as laboratories and auditoriums for the farmers. These are sure to be increasingly frequent as the demand grows on the part of farmers for accurate and authoritative teaching, and as the railway officials come to understand that the most profitable thing to sow along the line is knowledge, and that nothing gives such profitable crops as science. The great Burlington system now hires one of the noted agricultural experts of the world to work with the farmers, and another eminent agricultural college professor has gone into the service of that system which, while it may not reign, rules over the industrial destinies of “The Rock Island States of America.” The railroads everywhere, are doing excellent work in educating the farmers. This work is wise, and is sure to bring the results the railroads desire. The introduction of good agricultural methods, like the implanting of truth in any form, is one of those germinal acts that go on of their own accord when once the initial impulse is given. Dry farming will be practiced centuries hence better than now, and the Northern Pacific will carry its tonnage.

THE DOMINANCE OF TONNAGE.

But all these fine things have been done and are still being done with a eye single to tonnage. The railway officials who are doing them would strenuously deny any other motive than that of filling trains with agricultural produce. “What justification,” says the old-fashioned stockholder at the annual meeting, “can be given for using money of the railway for such new-fangled flub-dub as this special train filled with college professors and farmers?” “It’s a cold business proposition,” says the general manager. “If we can get the farmers to grow steers that will weigh a ton as against the present ones that weigh a thousand pounds, our livestock tonnage is doubled, and at the expense of a few special trains and an agricultural department, we obtain on the present lines all the results of a greater mileage. Better agriculture means more freight. That’s the justification, and the only one. It’s a plain business proposition!”

We may trust the enlightened selfishness of good business to push this sort of activity to the limit of its profit; and it is a fine thing to think that the railways cannot benefit themselves by spreading the light of agricultural science without benefiting the farmers and the whole nation. Favors of this sort bless him that receives quite as much as him that gives. But does the duty of the railway end with tonnage? Can we ask the railways to do anything for the farms and the farmers beyond the things which mediately or immediately will fill trains of cars with profitable freight? In the great task of conservation do the railways owe any duty to the farms beyond what they are now performing? This phase of the subject has yet to be worked out.

SOME HISTORIC PHRASES.

A few striking phrases have thrown on the screen of history the views of the generation of railway men who denied, and some of them still deny, anything in the way of duty of the sort hinted at. Some of these may be apocryphal utterances, but they tell the truth for all that. It is recorded that a Louisville & Nashville official, on being asked whether or not the people on his lines had any alternative other than to pay what the railway exacted, answered, “Yes! They can walk!” The historic Vanderbilt aphorism is “The public be damned!” It has been related of Jay Gould that his cynical rule for the making of rates on agricultural produce was that the farmers should always be allowed to retain enough for seed. Such opinions as these were the prevailing ones until recently. They were based on the view that the railways were purely private things. Under their sway railway men claimed the right to decide what cities should flourish and what decline, where towns should be built and where not, what shippers should be prosperous and what fail. They claimed these rights and they exercised them. To men of that school the things I shall say will seem like nonsense. They do not see that the control of the highways of a nation carries with it the rulership of the people; or if they do see it, they refuse to recognize the right of the people to say how that rulership shall be exercised, how long it shall continue, and when it shall end. And this is the lesson of the present and the immediate future for the railroads of America. A railway official is of right a public official, and he is nothing else. His duties to his stockholders are important and call upon him for scrupulous fidelity, but they are subject to his duties to the public. For on the highways depend the welfare of the whole people; the stockholders are a part only of the people; and the whole is greater than any part. In the last analysis, the stockholders and bondholders of the railways must come to a realization of the fact that they have placed their interests in the keeping of the people of the Nation, and that their profits must depend on the sense of justice of that people. Fortunately, there is no reason to expect from the people the slightest failure to respect the real rights of capital. But that modifications of railway policy are likely to be insisted upon, is not only likely, but inevitable. These modifications will be along the line of revisions of rates, the adoption of the principle that the railway must be used as a tool in the development of the Nation along rational and just lines, and not arbitrary ones, and in the conservation of the national resources—among which one of the most important, if not the most important, is the fertility of the soil.

RATES AND LIVING COST.

First, as to rates. There has been a good deal written of late for the purpose of securing for the railways an acquittal of every charge that has been or ever can be brought against them of having anything to do with the increased cost of living. Inasmuch as the cost of transportation is a part of the cost of every article consumed, freight rates may, and doubtless do, conceal much that makes for high prices. A Johns Hopkins professor says: “The claim of the railroads that the rates on foodstuffs are not high enough to enter as a factor in fixing the selling price is fully substantiated by the dealers in such products.” And again the same authority says: “The average weight of a carload of food products is 30,000 pounds. If the freight on such a carload be $300 the rate per pound would be only one cent, and there is scarcely a commodity upon which a freight rate of one cent per pound makes any difference in the selling price.”

When one considers the staples on which a cent a pound constitutes from six to twenty per cent of the selling price, these extremely sweeping statements must be admitted to need a lot of verification. Those who feel most keenly the pinch of high prices live mostly on things which sell at from four to twenty cents a pound—of which price an average of a cent a pound freight is a considerable increase. But the efforts mentioned have not been confined to arguments of the sort above quoted. We are called upon to believe not only that no appreciable freight charge is added to the burdens of the consumer, but that nothing worth mentioning is deducted as freight from the prices to the producer. We thus have the great incomes of the railroads very neatly palmed and effectually concealed somewhere between the professor of economics and the Secretary of Agriculture. For Secretary Wilson asserts that:

With approximate accuracy it has been determined that when
the farmer receives 50 per cent of the consumer’s price, the
freight charge on butter is about 0.5 of 1 per cent of the
consumer’s price; eggs, 0.6 of 1 per cent; apples, 6.8 per
cent; beans, 2.4 per cent; potatoes, 7.4 per cent; grains of
all sorts, 3.8 per cent; hay, 7.4 per cent; cattle and hogs,
1.2 per cent; live poultry, 2.2 per cent; wool, 0.3 of 1 per
cent.

These things are very convincing. And they are, no doubt, reliable as to averages. The trouble with them is that they are averages, and that they have the merits and defects of averages. One of the defects is that they do not tell the real truth. I have in mind a farmer living at New Rockford, North Dakota. He grows wheat as his staple crop, and about the only crop upon which it is at all safe to depend. His task is to help feed the world. As this is written, his wheat is worth in New York, if for export, a dollar a bushel, if for milling in this country two cents more. In addition to the cost of handling, the New Rockford farmer must submit to a deduction of twenty-four cents per bushel in price for freight to New York if for export, and of twenty-six cents if for domestic use. Something like 35 to 40 per cent of his returns is deducted for freight. It may satisfy the city consumer of bread to be told that this freight does not add “materially” to the cost of his living, but the New Rockford farmer is stubborn, and merely because his freight charge is a third or more of his returns, he is not mollified by Secretary Wilson’s statement that all grains “on the average” get to market with a deduction for transportation of three and eight-tenths per cent. In Johns Hopkins and at Washington, the freight charge may not amount to much. It is far otherwise at New Rockford.

A North Dakota station and a low grade staple are selected for the purpose of putting a finger on the point where the railways and the farmers clash crucially. They clash thus in the heart of the continent where distances to market are long, where there has been no rate structure fixed under competition, and where the farm produces in the main cheap and heavy staples. Whether grain, hay, root crops, or live stock, the case is the same—prices at the railway station are reduced to the point of vanishing profits by freight charges; and the cost of living on the farm is proportionately increased by the same agency.

HOW TO DEVELOP THE REMOTE PARTS.

The greatest transportation fact faced by the American people is the problem of developing the remote parts of the continent under conditions which are new to the experience of the human race. In the past mankind has been content to develop its great civilization near waterways. The sites of Egypt, Greece, Rome, Phoenicia and Carthage were determined by ease of transportation. Whether or not it is possible for the interior of the North American continent to be fully developed industrially by land carriage only is a question which is as yet an open one. It is safe to say that such development cannot take place without the adoption by the railways of some new transportation principles, applied for the express purpose of national welfare. And if the only alternative—the building of a national system of waterways—be resorted to, the aid of the railways must still be demanded if success is to be attained.

Rates as a deduction from the income of the farmer are even on the face of the averages quoted, considerable; but in the interior and on things produced at a close margin of profit, they are decisive of the matter of agricultural prosperity. On butter they are so inconsiderable as a proportion that the output of Dakota creameries has not infrequently gone on the market under conditions which enabled the Western butter-maker to pay his entire freight bill with the difference in his favor in the matter of quality. On eggs the burden of freight is similarly light. But on potatoes the freight is, according to the figures of the Secretary of Agriculture, 7.4 per cent of the consumer’s price, or about fifteen per cent of the farmers’ returns, as a national average. It is quite clear that the Montana or Nebraska potato grower must often find the freight, over the great distances to market, decisive of the question of profit or no profit. An acre of onions takes the labor of two or three persons a good part of the season. The cultivation is largely done with hand tools manipulated while the worker kneels and bends his body to the ground. His produce should be about a carload. If on this he pays the railways $300 freight it is a not inconsiderable contribution on the part of one gardener and one acre of land to the transportation system of the Nation.

Just what is included in these professorial and secretarial calculations is not quite clear. The word “freight” may or may not include such items as the charges for refrigeration and of refrigerator car companies, fast freight lines and the like, and until we know as to these items, we are unable to decide on the worth of the statistics. But one item of expense which through the policy of the railway companies the farmers are obliged to pay is clearly not included—I refer to the charges of the express companies.

The railways of the United States have enormously retarded the agricultural development of the country, and added to the expense of living, by permitting the lodgment in our transportation system of that industrial parasite, the express company. Just what are the financial inter-relations which have contributed to the willingness of the railways to allow parcels carriage to pass from their hands, while sufficiently obvious in a general way, cannot now be detailed. The glaring fact is that the express companies, save for certain services which they have, in violation of the criminal law, usurped from the postal system, perform absolutely no functions which do not properly belong to the railways, and no functions which the railways of other lands do not assume. Every dollar of the huge profits which the express companies make is a burden upon industry which is unnecessary and unjust. But instead of seeking to remedy or lessen this burden, the railways pursue the policy of making it greater. They practically abandon the field of parcels carriage to the express companies. They allow their agents everywhere to work for the express companies on commission, so that their wages are increased as express business increases, while their interest in the growth of railway business is reduced to a minimum by the receipt from the railway of only a small fixed salary. Thus the railways not only turn over to the express companies the parcels business, but saddle on that business, and on the shippers by express, a good deal of the burden of their own payroll.

THE TOLLS ASSESSED ON AGRICULTURE.

The effect of this policy on agriculture is not to be measured by the amount of express tolls paid on shipments made. That is a great burden, but it is inconsiderable as compared with its injury to the farmers and to the Nation by reason of the immense volume of potential traffic that does not move at all. Under the paternal governments of the Australasian colonies of Great Britain, agriculture is fostered by low railway rates and a carefully studied policy of encouragement to the small shipper. Packages of poultry, eggs, meats and other farm products are collected on the remote railway lines, brought to concentration points, refrigerated, shipped to the world’s markets, sold and remitted for to the great benefit of the remote farmers, who otherwise would have no way of marketing their little shipments. But here the trucker and poultryman and the fruit-grower are in most localities relegated by the railways to a third party—the express company—who seems to have no office but the exaction of tolls which the railway itself could not charge, but which it divides with the railway. This is unjust and is rapidly becoming intolerable. The farmer must be placed in such position that he can work up trade in the city and ship in small packages direct to the consumer at just rates. The head of one of our great railway systems has delivered several powerful addresses recently, in which he has asserted that the farmers, and not the railways, are to blame for the spread of from 30 to 75 per cent between the price received by the producer of food products and that paid by the consumer. He advises farmers to “cut out the middleman.” Good counsel, but let him follow his own advice. Let him, and let all railways cut out the express middlemen, the private car middlemen, the fast freight line middlemen, and the ordinary farmer will be placed in better position for taking his advice. These agencies have no place in a rational system of transportation. They are parasites, which suck blood and confer no benefit. Transportation by rail should be a simple transaction between the railway and the shipper, and with no third party whatsoever. Whatever there may be in the way of parcels transportation which does not properly belong to the railways should be assumed by the government in the form of a general parcels post.

With the way cleared to simple relations between shipper and railroad, the matter of rate-making in the interests of national development may be taken up, and the railroads enlisted in such policies as may be dictated by patriotism. In these the farmers are entitled to so much of special consideration as is commanded by the importance of agriculture as the basic industry of the world—no more, no less. In many schedules the railroads have favored agricultural development. These instances are those in which farming interests have been controlling in the matter of dividends. Perhaps we should expect nothing more of the purely individualistic philosophy of the past, but of the future we must demand much more.

RATES AND DEVELOPMENT.

Instances of the influence of railway policies on agriculture may be found in almost every country of the world. The beet sugar industry of Austria has been built up through the adjustment of railway rates. Huebner says of the German policy in this regard:

With the deliberate purpose of regulating industry and
commerce through the powerful medium of freight rates, 63
per cent of the traffic is given rates generally about half
as high as classified rates and seemingly unusually low as
compared with rates enforced in neighboring countries. These
rates are given to build up particular industries, to promote
specified districts, to protect German railways against foreign
competition, to overcome emergencies, to build up German
sea-ports, to promote German export trade, and discourage the
entry of specified imports.

We have been told over and over again that the acquisition of the railroads of Germany by the government has been dictated by consideration of military strategy; but the world is just awakening to the fact that it is rather industrial strategy which has impelled the Germans to government ownership. The time is coming when the German railways will be freed from the fixed charges of both bonds and stocks, and German agricultural products will go to market, with her manufactures, at rates based on actual cost of service. The fostering uses of properly adjusted rates as applied to remote agricultural districts in Australia and New Zealand have been known to the world for years. Protection to home industries through tariffs has failed to benefit our farmers in any direct way, and the policy of attempting longer to maintain such tariffs seems to be in process of abandonment; but Van Wagenen has pointed out that agriculture may be stimulated and fostered through railway rates, and given all the benefits which clearly accrue to protected industries through tariffs. It might be no more than fair to the farmers if some of the taxes exacted from them through tariffs in the interests of manufacturers, were returned to them in such freight rates as would develop their agriculture along the intensive lines made possible by nearness to market; but it might be unfair to ask privately-owned railways to do it.

The whole structure of rates as they now exist is devised to favor the long line to and from market, and made up with reference to the demands of certain trade centers, and certain powerful financial interests, some of which are closely allied to the ownership of the control of railways. A striking instance of this is to be found in the history of the rates on the border line between the Gulf trade basin, and the territory of the railways running to Chicago and the Atlantic ports. From Kansas and Oklahoma points the distance to tidewater on the Gulf is only from a quarter to a half the distance to the Atlantic. The farmers of that region, and of a great part of Nebraska, Colorado, and much other territory, are entitled to an outlet by way of the Gulf. It is nearer. It is over cheaper track. It is on easier grades. It should be in every way more economical. But when the battle between the old lines and the new began with the building of the roads to the Gulf, it was fought out, not along lines of what was best for the Nation, not along lines of what was best for the farmers whose stake in the controversy was the right to a fair price for their grain, but with sole reference to the interests of the railways themselves, and of the grain trade with which the railways have always maintained so intimate a friendship. Such agreements were made that grain would be as likely to go from Kansas City to the Atlantic as to the Gulf. In other words, the building of the Gulf lines was robbed of its benefits to the farmer. Rates were so adjusted, and still are, as to make the Gulf lines as bad for the farmer as the Atlantic lines, instead of making the old lines as good as the new should be. This is equivalent, as an economic futility, to the plan of handicapping the binder so as to restrict its work to the amount done by the same force in the old days of hand binding. Financially it may be wise—for the elevator trade, and the railway community of interest—but it is an economic crime as much as the breaking of the power looms by the old weavers. The present railway situation is full of such anomalies. One could spend days in their discussion. They are familiar to the shippers of the nation. They are apologized for by the wise men who write great tomes on transportation. But they must sometime be so corrected that trade will go on the railroad which can perform the transportation task most economically, without regard to the historic channels of traffic and the private interests concerned in the use thereof.

“TAPERING RATES.”

I have spoken of the difficulties which confront the people of the deep interior of the continent in working out their complete industrial development. By complete industrial development, I mean that full growth in industry which has come to such seaboard locations as Great Britain, the Netherlands, our Eastern seaboard, our lake regions and the like. One can scarcely conceive such complete development in Iowa, Nebraska, the Dakotas, or Oklahoma. And yet it is merely a question of transportation. The problem of the future relates to the question of the ability of land carriage of any kind to furnish it. If it cannot be accomplished by land carriage, the Nation will have recourse to waterways. New Rockford and her sister hamlets will reach the sea, either by the way of the railroads, or by the Missouri river. If the railways are to give New Rockford—and in her I typify all the interior—what it must have if it is to develope completely, they must find some way to compensate the place by means of rates for its remoteness from the sea.

This may be done by what is called “tapering rates”—that is, by rates which increase not with the distance, but on some basis which gives the remote point a less tariff per ton a mile than the nearby point. The railroads have made such rates always when the demands of profit called for them; and their policy has resulted in great benefit to the interior; but the diverse ownership of the different lines and restrictive laws, as well as the lack of a national policy in rate-making, conspire to prevent the full application of the principle. Congressman D. J. Lewis of Maryland has laid down the principle that rates along a line should increase with the square root of the distance, instead of with the distance. Thus, if the proper rate per hundredweight for twenty-five miles is ten cents, for 625 miles the rate should be not $2.50, which would be the increase directly with the distance, but twenty-five cents, the increase over ten cents according to the square root of the distance. The value of this formula may lie principally in the emphasis of the economic justice, as well as the necessity, of tapering rates for long hauls. As it is, rates taper from New York to Chicago, not according to the square root formula, but in a manner not very much at odds with it; but then they are increased by the fresh start from Chicago as a basing point. Under a national policy in rate-making, these rates would continue to taper to the point at which it would be more economical to ship in some other direction—to the Pacific, or to the Gulf.

The influence of tapering rates on the industrial development of a people may be seen strikingly manifested in Texas, which has long had a rate system peculiar to itself. This system is said to be the fruit of the statesmanship of Judge Reagan, and was devised expressly in the interests of a population deemed to be permanently agricultural. It is exactly the opposite of the general policy which has built up a few great cities at the expense of the rest of the country, and the best or worst example of which is perhaps the case of Chicago. Chicago is fed by livestock shipments which sweep past the very doors of packing houses quite as well equipped to slaughter the stock as any in the Windy City, and the livestock rates are only a sample of the system of tariffs that keep in Chicago’s hands the headship in commerce to which in the natural development of things she would not be entitled. Railroad rates keep the great centers great by decreeing that the primary products shall be sold there, and that the supplies of goods ready for consumption shall be bought there. This is done by depriving other trade centers of the natural advantages over Chicago, of their nearness to the farms, while leaving them handicapped by their remoteness from water transportation. And wherever a great city is found in the United States, the same sort of rate structure is found. The economic result is that long hauls are favored for the railroads, with greater profits to them perhaps; but the farmers are deprived of the benefits of the home markets which nearby large cities afford. The state of Iowa is Chicago’s back field; and Iowa’s population is shrinking. This fact alone is enough to condemn the rate system which permits it. And Iowa’s case is glaring merely because she is an almost purely agricultural state. The farm populations of the other states on Chicago’s back fields are shrinking, also. And while I do not think it fair to attribute all this to rate mal-adjustments, I feel sure that if the Texas system of rates had been in effect in the Chicago-St. Louis basin, the phenomenon of decreasing population would have been long postponed, and might never have appeared.

THE TEXAS SYSTEM OF RATES.

The Texas system, as perfected by the Texas State Railway Commission, is based on the theory that many medium sized towns and cities are to be preferred, for the agricultural welfare of the state, to one or two overgrown municipalities with rates made to stimulate their growths at the expense of the rest. This has been accomplished by the establishment of a maximum freight charge, above which there can be no increase, no matter what the distance—with the exception of certain remote points in the cases of which additions are made, not according to the entire length of haul, but according to their distance beyond the limits of the zone which is established about every shipping point. Thus merchandise taking the class rates pays a tariff from any shipping point according to distance, up to 245 miles, beyond which the rate for 245 miles is paid no matter what the distance. The maximum rate on cotton is reached at 160 miles from any station; on flour, grain and hay at 140 miles; on coal, 790 miles; on fruits, vegetables and melons, 180 miles, and thus for all shipments. The result is that the remote truck farmer is as close, so far as rates are concerned, to the city 500 miles away, as to the one 180 miles off—and the principle is applied to all producers, with variations as to distance. This gives him a wide choice in markets and rates, which equalizes conditions so far as rates can do so, between the interior and the coast. And it fosters the small and new city by enabling it to compete in jobbing and manufacturing with the large and old one. Thus, while such places as Galveston, Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth and Waco are among the most prosperous towns of their size in the country, they are constantly meeting the competition of that numerous class of smaller Texan cities the unsuspected presence of which in the interior is such a constant surprise to the traveler from the North. Business is decentralized to an extent nowhere else seen in the United States in an agricultural community. And decentralization, while opposed to the immediate interests of the railways, is clearly profitable to the farmers, better for the people in general, and in all probability will prove in the end better for the railways themselves. For after all, railroad prosperity must depend on national prosperity.

It may be said that the Texas system has been tried out on a small and a state scale only. On a state scale, truly, but not on a small scale by any means. From El Paso to Texarkana the distance is almost exactly that from New York to Chicago, and from Brownsville to Texline is as far as from Kansas City to Winnipeg. Moreover, Texas has most of the problems which confront the Nation itself in working out a national system of rate-making—a coast well settled and old in development with all the wealth and power that the conditions imply—a hinterland ranging in conditions from fine farming land like that of Iowa, through semi-arid to desert. The Texas rate system may not be the last word in rate-making, and probably is not; but it seems to work well, and is certainly worth study. As will be seen at a glance, it is a modification of the systems of tapering rates suggested above—in which rates taper to a point where a maximum is reached, and then cease to increase at all. It is also a modification of the zone system in effect on certain foreign railways, under which within certain territorial limits railway rates are flat, like postage. The economic basis for such rates lies in considerations of national welfare, coupled with the well-known transportation principle that the terminal charge which makes up so large a portion of most shipments, is the same for a long haul as a short one.

THE DECLINE OF NEW ENGLAND AGRICULTURE.

For purposes relating to the fostering of such interests as seemed necessary to the welfare of New England and New England’s tonnage, the railroads have themselves put in effect with reference to that section a system of rates which in some ways resembles the zone system of Europe, or the maximum distance tariff of Texas. Cut off by the tariff on imports from her natural hinterland, Canada, the decline of New England’s agriculture under the competition of the prairie lands would have brought to her a permanent industrial decline, had she not turned her attention to manufacturing. And even as to that, she was placed at a disadvantage as soon as the development of the Middle States and Middle West brought that great region to the manufacturing stage. For New England’s manufactures had to go to market through New York, and most of her raw materials had to be imported from the West and the South. The railways used their powers of rulership in the interests of this whole group of states, as they are constantly doing in the case of cities—they decreed prosperity to New England’s manufacturers through a rate system. They made of New England a flat-rate zone for raw materials, with the same rate to all points, and practically the same as the rate to New York. This applies to all raw materials coming from west of a line drawn from Buffalo to Pittsburg through Wheeling. For out-going shipments, they gave all New England points a flat uniform rate to all points west of a line drawn from Cleveland to the Ohio river. That the wage earners of New England might be favored in cost of living—a feature reflected in low wages—the food products from the West are given a rate practically the same as that to New York—and thus the ruin of the old New England agriculture, already probable, was made certain. Had it not been for these imperial measures, New England’s headship in manufacturing would have been lost, first to the Middle States, and then, perhaps, to the Middle West. The expedient differs from the Texas system in the fact that it is applied partially and in the interests of manufactures, with New York as a center, while the Texas system is applied for the purpose of decentralizing business by making every shipping point the center of its own flat-rate zone.

But the most striking illustration of the power of the railroads to foster or to blight industry, lies perhaps after all in the field of agriculture. And it so happens that it is also the instance of the application on the broadest scale of the zone principle in which all rates are the same to all points within certain territorial limits. I refer to the rate structure which has been built up for the transportation of the citrus and other fruits and vegetables of the Pacific coast and the Pacific Northwest to the markets of the eastern half of the continent. While the principle is applied with more or less completeness to shipments of deciduous fruits and truck, it is best studied in its relation to citrus fruits. Oranges and lemons go to all points east of Denver at a flat rate. From Cheyenne, Wyoming, to Eastport, Maine, the rate on citrus fruit is the same. The effect has been most beneficial to the agriculture of the Western quarter of the United States, to the people at large, and to the railways. Whether or not the rates are just, the principle upon which they are made is conducive to the development of agriculture and is, perhaps, essential to such development, when the industry is hampered by land carriage over great distances. And nothing need be said in addition to citing these instances of the determinative effects of our railway rates on the course of prosperity, in spite of the averages which seem to show the economic unimportance of rates.

SOIL DEPLETION.

Thus far, I have discussed the influence of railroad policies upon the farmer as a man engaged in one of the many industries which make up the sum of industrial activities. But there are certain respects in which the farmer represents the everlasting welfare of the race, and certain demands which he may legitimately make on the transportation agencies of the land which are based on every man’s heritage in the soil, and interest in its continued fertility. The depletion of the soil by cropping is largely accomplished through transportation, and its restoration to fertility must be accomplished, where such restoration is necessary, in large measure, through the same agencies.

The soil is a reservoir of plant food. Most of the dozen or so elements used by plants in building themselves up from the soil are found in it in such great abundance that we need take little care for their conservation. Only three—or possibly four—are so scarce as to call for anxiety. These three are nitrogen, potash and phosphorus.

Potash is ordinarily found in soils in such quantities as to render its application unnecessary and yet there exist localities in almost every state where a marked poverty exists in this element. Peaty soils are always deficient in potash, and as the swamps of the Nation are drained the potash problem will grow in importance. Commercial potash is mostly imported from Germany, where the government’s conservation measures have already brought its export into the field of somewhat vexing diplomacy. The German supply would seem adequate for the world’s demands for many centuries. The deposit underlies more than a million acres, and in the Strassfurt district, where it was discovered some fifty years ago, the total thickness of the potassium-bearing strata amounts to the astonishing depth of 5,000 feet. It is estimated that this wonderful supply at the present rate of mining will last 190,000 years. It should be remembered, however, that reclamation activities are likely more and more to be directed to swamps as the arid regions are brought under irrigation, and that the drain on the German potash deposits is likely to increase in a geometrical ratio. Our Government does well, therefore, to push diligently the search for potash deposits at home, which it is doing with some prospects of success. In any case, we are not dependent on the German deposits as an ultimate fact; for the waters of the sea are the source from which these great deposits originally came, and there seems no reason to doubt the ultimate feasibility of obtaining potash for all future time from that inexhaustible source, if the geological deposits fail or are denied us. But the matter of getting potash to the land, from whatever source it comes, is a railroad problem in most cases.

IMPORTING FERTILIZERS.

Since the guano deposits of the Pacific islands, and the nitrate deposits of Chili were opened to the agriculture of the world, the carriage of nitrogen to the soil has been a great transportation feature. For nitrogen is often the limiting element in the soil. It exists in the earth in small quantities only, and though all cultivated plants are bathed in a limitless sea of it in the atmosphere, they have not the power of using any except that which is fixed in the soil. They starve for nitrogen, while blown about by winds filled with it. Not all plants, however, are so helpless in the matter of taking nitrogen from the air. The plants grown as crops are utterly unable to help themselves to the plentiful atmospheric supply, but certain minute plants called bacteria have the power denied to those of higher organization, and it is certain that almost all of the fixed nitrogen in the earth’s crust, in the guano beds, in the nitrate deposits of Chili and elsewhere, has been taken from the air by these bacteria, aided perhaps by certain fungi which grow about the roots of plants like the oak, and by the negligible fixation of nitrogen by lightning. These bacteria are coöperators with certain plants of the bean family—clovers, alfalfa, vetches, sweet clover, beans, peas, velvet beans, cowpeas and the like. The microscopic plants grow on the roots of these legumes—and to some extent free, or associated with non-leguminous plants—on the basis of mutual aid. The bacteria reach out into the soil and fix nitrogen for the legumes, and the legumes furnish a host on which the bacteria live, just as we furnish a host for the bacteria of disease. And when a crop of any legume is plowed down into the soil, it is found to have added to the land nitrates to the value, sometimes, of more than twenty-five dollars per acre. Thus by setting in motion the forces of nature, the farmer may draw nitrogen from the very heavens above his farm, without money and without price. This is perhaps the most vital agricultural discovery of the ages.

But how, you may say, is the nitrogen supply a matter of concern to the railroads, if nitrates may be drawn from the air? Unfortunately, there is work for them to do in assisting the farmer to adapt conditions in his soil to the needs of these bacteria. For some reasons, the bacteria of the clovers and their leguminous cousins will not do well in a soil that is acid; and soils tend to become acid through cultivation. Acidity is the bane of the older farms of the United States. When acid phosphates are applied for the purpose of furnishing phosphorus to the crops, the very process of fertilization tends to produce acidity. Most of the prairie soils were originally alkaline, and finely adapted to the growth of the favoring bacteria of the legumes, but plants that thrive on acid soils—especially the sorrel—are appearing in the prairie states of the Mississippi Valley, and wherever they appear, clovers cease to thrive.

THE VALUE OF LIME.

Nature’s remedy for acidity in the soil is lime. The basis of the great alfalfa industry in the West and Southwest is the high percentage of lime in the arid soils, which have retained this precious element through that very dryness which, until irrigation redeemed it, made some of it a desert. Now lime is needed over a great part of the United States east of the Mississippi. Even where the soil is of limestone origin, it may have become acid by the dissolving of the lime out of the surface soil. In Wisconsin a great area of otherwise good land has been found to be acid, though a stratum of limestone lies only a few feet below the grass roots. The abandoned farms of New England need lime. The old farms of New York and Pennsylvania, and all the South, need lime. Wherever the legumes fail to arrive, lime is a prime need. Carbonate of lime is the basis of legume culture, and successful agriculture everywhere—in China, in Japan, in India, in the highly cultivated nations of Europe—is based on leguminous crops. The supply of nitrogen to these states of ours in which agriculture has languished must be restored through lime in the soil and rotations in which legumes shall have large part. And the supply of lime is essentially a transportation question.

Lime is one of the most plentiful of the elements necessary to agriculture. Its application to the land has in some periods achieved such bad repute that there is a maxim among farmers that lime makes the children rich but the grandchildren poor. The evils referred to, however, arise, I believe, from the application of caustic lime, and are not necessary to the use of lime. It has now been determined, I believe it is safe to say, that raw ground limestone is the best form of lime in which it can be given to the soil. It may be applied in any amount without injury. If raw ground limestone could be spread an inch deep over the farms east of the Mississippi (and in many localities west of it) it would bring about a condition which would soon swamp the railroads with tonnage; and while there are some favored soils to which it would do no good, it would nowhere do any harm. It would put the East on a parity with the alfalfa lands of the West in the matter of the production of legumes, and would bring hope to the discouraged farmers who strive against the obscure evils of increasing soil acidity.

Limestone occurs along the lines of every railway. It is almost as common and cheap as gravel. It can be ground cheaply, and cheaply shipped. It should be furnished to the farms at gravel prices. Burned lime is sold at almost prohibitive prices, and thousands of farmers who know their needs are deterred from satisfying them because of poverty. This is a problem which enlightened statesmanship should solve in the interests of the Nation, and one to the solution of which a railroad system operated in the interests of the national welfare would surely address itself.

PHOSPHORUS.

Phosphorus is the element which is perhaps most commonly lacking when a soil is infertile. A good soil should contain not less than 2,000 pounds of it in the top foot of ground. Many so-called exhausted soils are reduced to less than a sixth of this amount. A crop of corn of a hundred bushels to the acre takes from the soil of each acre twenty-three pounds of phosphorus; a fifty-bushel wheat crop takes sixteen pounds, a two-bale cotton crop takes thirty pounds, and other crops in like manner subtract from the phosphorus supply. Only about one per cent of the supply is available to the crop of any one year—that is, in their hunt for phosphorus the rootlets are unable to find more than one atom in a hundred. Thus we see that a good soil provided with 2,000 pounds of phosphorus to the acre within reach of the roots cannot produce a 100-bushel crop of corn. Such a crop must have twenty-three pounds of phosphorus, and the roots can find only twenty—and the next year the supply will be reduced to 1,980 pounds, and the roots will be able to find but nineteen and eight-tenths per cent of phosphorus for the dwindling crop. The 2,000 pounds of phosphorus would be quite adequate to the needs of the fifty-bushel wheat crop, but it would fall short by one-third of meeting the demands of the two-bale cotton crop. As so of all crops. They draw on the supply of a limiting element, and as successive croppings reduce this supply, the crop falls off until we have the four-bushel wheat crop, the ten-bushel corn crop, the third-of-a-bale cotton crop, which marks the ruin of the farmer—and the railway.

There is no way to supply phosphorus to the soil save by carrying it upon the land and applying it. It is not found, like nitrogen in the air. It may be brought back in manure and the bones of slaughtered animals, and the process of depletion retarded, but this game is inevitably a losing one like those gambling games in which there is always a percentage in favor of the house. The fertility flushed into the waters of the earth through sewers, the waste of manure, the leaching of soil by rains—all these are the percentages in favor of the house, and against the players. The players are we—the human race—and the house is the massed forces of nature. There seems to be no way to play this game of life without losing. If the earth ever becomes unable to sustain human life, there is good reason to believe that our doom will reach us through failure of the supply of phosphorus in the soil.

There is no phosphorus in the air, and in the waters the supply is negligible. It is an element, and until we discover the secret of the transmutation of elements we cannot make it. As it disappears from the soil there is no source of replenishment of the supply, except in the phosphate rocks of the earth. And while the failure of the soil to give its increase, and the depopulation of the earth through the exhaustion of this element of plant food may seem remote and speculative, the necessity of transporting the phosphate rocks from the quarries to the farms is an actual and present one. And it is a matter which lies within the relations between the railroads and the farmers.

PHOSPHATE RESOURCES.

Fortunately for the permanent agriculture of the United States, the largest known deposits of phosphorus in nature are within her boundaries. Guano, which is merely the manure accumulated on rainless islands where seabirds congregate, is of very limited importance in the long run, though for so long the source from which most of the world’s commercial phosphates were derived. The phosphate rocks of the world are, so far as known, preponderantly in the United States. All the phosphate rock now mined, I believe, comes from the three states of South Carolina, Florida and Tennessee—whence the rock is now shipped at a rate which will exhaust them about the year 1930. On three Pacific islands are known deposits of high grade rock of about the same amount as that still remaining unmined in these three states—about 60,000,000 tons in each case. These rocks contain from sixty to eighty per cent of calcium phosphate. As they fall off in output, and the need for phosphorus becomes more bitter, the farmers must use rock of lower and lower grade, and the task of transporting it will become proportionately greater.

Indeed, the task of transportation will begin to increase long before it becomes necessary to resort to the low grade rock. For far from the depleted lands, in Utah, Idaho and Wyoming, are the greatest high grade phosphate beds in the world—something like half a billion tons of rock practically in sight (according to Van Hise), and averaging over seventy per cent tricalcium phosphate. The existence of these great deposits, and of the low grade beds known to exist elsewhere, together with the probability that other beds will be discovered, justifies the highest optimism as to the future of agriculture—if transportation facilities can be afforded which will place the phosphates on the ground on terms tolerable to the farmers and profitable to them. This is a railway problem. As a mere matter of tonnage it is potentially greater than any other transportation item, save the one of supplying the fields with lime.

At present this sole supply of available phosphate rock is being carried off to Europe as fast as the mills can grind and the railways carry it to the ships. Nothing is being done to conserve the supply, so far as I am aware, in emulation of Germany’s statesmanship in conserving her potash beds. It would be unfair to blame the railways which only act as common carriers in these shipments. But it might not be too much to expect of the patriotism of the men who have these great interests in hand to ask them to reverse the policy which they have adopted as to many other commodities, and to make higher rates for export on phosphate rock than for home consumption. The real remedy for the drain of phosphorus lies, of course, with the Government. We are forbidden by the Constitution to stop shipments abroad by means of an export duty, but we have the right to stop exports entirely, or to limit them. Our ethical right to refuse to divide the phosphate treasures with the needy agriculture of the world may be open to question; but we might surely demand that the foreign deposits be worked first for the foreign demand. The shipment of our phosphates abroad, with the certainty confronting us that at some future time we shall have to re-import the same commodity, involves an economic waste to which the world should not be subjected. And the railroads ought, in their own interests, to adopt every policy legally open to them to keep the phosphate rock for the use of the farms within their own transportation territory.

RATES AND FERTILIZERS.