Kansas agitator. [volume] (Garnett, Kan.) 1890-1905, 1897-08-27
OBSERVATION-DISCLOSURES MG2lG@@@
~ THE RAILROADS, THE MINERS STRIKE $@
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From The Coming Nation. Ruskin, Tennessee.
ARBITR ALTON


everyone but themselves loses money on every
ton sent to market. When the railroads elect
to have the output large, they furnish many cars,
and when they elect to have the output small,
they furnish few cars; when they elect there
shall be no output whatever, they furnish no
cars.
"Though coal is an article of commerce,
greater in volume than any other natural pro-
duct in the United States carried On railroads,
amounting to no less than 10000 900 tons a
year, and although the appliances for its trans
portation have been improved, and the cost
cheapened every year so that it can be handled
with less cost and risk than almost any other
class of freight, the startling fact appears in
the litigation before the interstate commerce
commission and the Investigations before con-
gress that anthracite freight rates have been
advanced instead of decreased, are higher now
than they were i'll 1879, and the coal is made
by these confederaed railroads to pay rates
vastly higher than the average of all other high
and low class reight-neaIly double the rate on
on wheat or cotton. These high freight rates
serve the double purpose of seeming to justify
the high price of coal and of killing off, year
by year, the independent coal producer S.
"What the railroad coal mines pays for fr eight
returns to its other self-the railroad. What
the independent coal producer pays goes to the
railroad-his competitor.
"This excess oyer just ard reasonable rates
of transportation constitutes all available fund
by which the railroads are enabled to crush out
the competition of independent coal p roducers.
"The railroad companies engaged in mining
and transporting coal are practically in COM
bnation to control the output at fixed price.
"They have practical monopoly of the pro-
duction, the transportation and sale of anthracite
coal.
"Ths has been the findings in all the inves-
LEGATIONS for go years.
"The anthracite collieres of Pennsylvania
could now produce $4,000, 900 tons year. The
railroads restrict the IL to 4o,ooo,o)o tons, nine
or ten million tons less than they could furnish
to ward off tie frost of winter and to speed the
wheels of the world, and this creation of arti-
fetal winter has been in progress from the be-
ginning of the combination.
''In the ten months between January and
November, 1892, the price of coal in the East,
as investigated by congress in 1898, was ad-
vanced by the coal railroads as much as $I.25
and $I.35 ton on the kinds used by house
keepers, and the combinations, the report Of
congress says, exercise even a more baneful in
fuence on the production and transportation of
coal for the Western market. The extortion
fixed by the coal railroads was found by con-
gress, III 1888, to be an average of 81 a TOM
considerably more than dollar ton on all
consumed in the United States, or $3o, 900, 900
in that year, and now $40 900 900 to $4I 900, 900
year. The same investigation found that be-
tween 1873 and 1886 $2o, 900, 900 more than
fair market price was taken from the public by
this combination
'By the same power, which has crushed out
the independent coal miner, the retailer in the
cities has been reduced from free man to an
instrument to despoil his neighbors--w whom
he is often fellow victim-for the benefit of
absentee capitalists; he is bounded by detectives
by threats of cutting off his supply, is made
compulsory member of secret oath-bound So
ciey to maintain prices. Combinations ex-
ist, says the Canadian report, among coal
dealers in Toronto, Ottawa Montreal and Lon