Arizona republican., 1914-10-24
SHIPPERS MAKE PLEA
Continued From Page one)

egg she did not lay"
 This statement was made by Cliff
 ord Thorne, counsel for several Wes- tern state railroad commissions and
 shippers organizations, in present. ing the shippers side of the case before the interstate commerce com mission for a general increase or freight rates by the eastern ra!l-
 roads.
 The hearings ended today and ar
 guments will begin next week. There
 are indications of an early decision by the commission. Opposing ship
 pers presented their case in two hours as compared with five days by the railroads. Thorne took the
 position that there is no business depression that does not affect the shippers equally with the railroads. This is the third time the Amerl- can railroads have sought to force
 6 general advance in freight rates,
 Thorne said in his statement for
 the shippers. Tn 1910 they claimed
 crisis existed Instead of a crisis, the commission found that to be the most prosperous year in the whole
 history of the American railroads In the original five per cent case,
 basing their claims on the year 1913,
 claim of a crisis was again made: it was concluded that there was no crisis in the condition of the rail- tha in;o n1a
 of territory, taken as a whole. and
 now. for the third time, the rail
 roads claim there is crisis. Today
 they have some foundation for their claim
 But this emergency, upon which carriers are relying today affects
 practically all of us in the same
 manner It is following period of marked depression in business for about a year, subsequent to the Bal kan wars, and the disturbance in Europe and short crops of last year.
 Tt is just as hard for the manu- facturer, farmer, laborer and tele-
 phone or beef trust to borrow money as for the railroads.
 Railroads are asking for a sort of
 war tax: they are asking the gov
 ernment to loft the burden off part
 of the community and shift it to the
 shoulders of others. They ask the wagearner who lost his job or had
 his wages reduced, the cotton plant CT who cannot sell his cotton, and the manufacturer who is compelled
 to close his shop or reduce his force. they ask these men to carry the burden of the railroads, in addition to their own.
 "The carriers claim the present
 emergency will compel them to pay higher interest rate, amounting to one or one-half percent substan- tial increase in the interest charges that occurred in 1893. 1904 and the latter part of 1907. On not one of these occasions did the carriers ad- vance their freight rates. They met
 the situation in another and wiser
 manner A policy that decrees high CT rates. during a period of depres- sion and lower rates during periods
 of prosperity would be intolerable. You would have a fluctuating scale of rates that would not be well for either the public or the railroads Further than that, advances would ! occur when the people could least
 afford them and reductions would come when the public needed them | least.
 l The present emergency can be met 1 in either one of two ways: first, by
 the use of accumulated surplus; or, second, by slight reduction in div | idend rates.
 i "The company that has wisely hus- | banded a substantial surplus during
 the last ten years of unprecedented
 prosperity, can now meet the situa-
 tion easily by resort to its accumu- lated surplus. The company that ilas
 not exercised this precaution can re- duce it's dividend rates.''
 | I1jra litt1o salesman at The Re-