One case of this sort, which shows the willingness of the Southern Pacific management to respond to what they considered a reasonable request, had to do with the shipment of beer from a place known as Boca, in the state of Nevada, to San Francisco. It appears that a gentleman named Hess once conceived the idea of establishing a brewery at Boca. This town was 220 miles from San Francisco, and yet all of Mr. Hess’s beer had to find a market in the latter place, in competition with beer from Milwaukee and St. Louis. Mr. Stubbs, general traffic manager of the Central Pacific, welcomed the proposal to build a brewery in the West, and put in special rates to help shut out the eastern product. Every pound of brewery supplies, he reasoned, would have to go over the Central Pacific. It was all clear gain, like so much money picked up out of the ditch. In another case the Southern Pacific quoted special rates on sugar from San Francisco to the Missouri River, to enable the California Sugar Refining Company and the American Sugar Refining Company to sell their sugar at the Missouri River in competition with sugar reaching New York by water and thence moving westward.[384] Still again, in 1884 an attempt was made to persuade the St. Louis-Kansas City lines to participate in a rate of 75 cents per hundred pounds on cast iron pipe from St. Louis to the Pacific Coast in order to encourage production in the Middle West in competition with that on the Atlantic seaboard. The matter of the 75-cent rate was taken up with J. W. Midgley, Trunk Line commissioner, who declined temporarily on December 24, 1884, on the ground that the rate would be a special one, and that there was an understanding that no special rates should be made prior to January 31 next ensuing, pending an anticipated agreement between the Transcontinental Association and its eastern connections.[385] In the instances which have been given, the impelling motive of the Southern Pacific was frankly to increase its profit by increasing the movement of freight over its line. Yet the shipper was also benefited because his interests were substantially identical with those of the railroad company, and he warmly welcomed the powerful support of the railroad lines. These cases are not unimportant. The enumeration of such isolated instances, however interesting as they may be, affords no very clear picture of the aggregate of local rate adjustments with which the Southern Pacific interests were concerned. For this purpose a more systematic survey of the rate system administered by the Southern Pacific is necessary, and to this attention is now directed. Distance the Governing Factor