The Wichita daily eagle. [volume] (Wichita, Kan.) 1890-1906, 1892-01-07

the interests of the entire people of
southwest Kansas.
Owners and managers of railways no
longer determine rates or seek to develop
new avenues for earnings except as fixed
by trust in which they have but one
voice in many. They are utterly power
lets to conserve the welfare of the COM
munlties along their respective lines,
although such conservation would in
crease their traffic and develop vast in
terests as would go to the direct support
of such roads. In short, there is no
longer any open competition among rail
ways such as exists between every other
conceivable business and between all
other interests Of public character owned
through capital stock. AS Mr..
Ady well puts it in his petition,
which follows this: "Shippers are
Gin precisely the same position
"they would be if every railroad west of
'the Missouri river was owned and OPP
"erated by a single corporation" In
fact the case is worse, for if so owned
they would be operated in the interest of
the territory covered by them instead of
being subject to the dictation of eastern
roads, as they are now. 1t makes no
difference under this traffic trust
whether a city secures two railroads or
ten SO far as any chance for open COM
peting rates are concerned. And SO
1t matters little to the Kansrs farmer
whether the eastern market is high or
low, the difference between the home
price and the terminal market being
"taken in" by the schedule of
freights fixed in the absence of
all competition by the tools of the
traffic trust. Whether hay is ten or forty
dollars per ton in Colorado, New Mexico,
Arizona and Utah, influences in no sense
the price of hay in Kansas and Nebraska.
or the value of our grass lands. The
fact that Wichita is but just half way
from the Gulf to Chicago does not pre-
vent the railroads from exacting from
our wholesale merchants double the
amount per ton for southern sugar that
Chicago, which is seven hundred miles
or double the distance away, pays, and
for the same sugar, over the same line,
IN the same train and on the same day,
This long haul and short haul robbery,
combined with the law that makes these
traffic trust-tools possible forces a Kansas
dealer to pay the freight charge on his
carload of sugar from San Francisco to
Kansas City and from Kansas City back
again to the point where the car was
stopped, but which car never went on to
Kansas City nor back.
The Interstate commission, when ap-
peaied to, decided that Wichita
must pay just the same per car for
Pacific sugar that st. Louis. 500 miles
farther away pays, although the sugar
for both points came in the same train,
on the same day and through Wichita,
or otherwise Wichita must pay the arbi-
trary Missouri river rate and the local
rate additional from Kansas City back
to Wichita. These are but two or three
prominent instances of outrageous and
repressive determinations IF a great
number which we might enumerate.
The great wave of prosperity brought
on by and to Kansas in the construction
of many supposed competing lines of
railway to which her people contributed
MILLIONS upon millions of aid, was STAYED
as soon as the traffic associations "got
in their work" under the interstate law.
since which time the interests Of the state
have continually tended to the worse.
Under the tool-rule of these traffic trusts.
all the trade, produce and commercial
of Kansas are made tributary
to a Missouri town whose DEVELOPMENT
and consequent wealth should have
been, in justice, divided among the
towns of the state for whom these rail |
ways were built to serve. The EAGLE
did not throw cold water on the PROPOSE !
ton TO improve the Missouri river be-
cause that steam was to be made naviga- |
BILE, but because such proposed improve !
ment was only a pretenSe for the more |
entrenching the Transmissouri |
Traffic association and the other traffic |
in holding that stream as a /
'basing line for railway freights to the |
letriment and injury of every interior
Town and farm in Kansas.
The action brought by Mr.. ADV, if !
breaks down the traffic trust
and tool combine known as the Trans /
missouri Freight association, which .