It is a mistake to believe that only low-grade commodities have been shipped by the water routes. While it is true that the principal movements by water are of the coarser freights, such as hardware, rails, pipe, sugar, hardwood lumber, and asphaltum, yet there has always been also a considerable transportation of higher grade articles, including cotton ducks and denims, beans, canned goods, and a large number of kinds of general merchandise. Indeed, all the canned salmon and a very large percentage of the canned goods, together with two-thirds of the beans produced in California, originate near enough to the coast to reach tide-water at an expense not exceeding 20 cents per hundred pounds. The Interstate Commerce Commission has remarked that almost every article which moves from the East to the Pacific Coast has been at times carried by the ocean,[398] and the truth of this statement is generally conceded in discussions on the water business. It was the pervasive character of water competition, and the fact that such competition was felt upon the Pacific Coast and not at interior points, which originally established the position of the Pacific terminal.[399] A terminal point, be it recalled, was, and is, under the transcontinental system, a place which enjoys rates low enough to attract traffic from the water to the railroad lines—a point also upon whose rates the rates to other points are based after the manner of the “basing point” system. San Francisco was a terminal. So was Stockton, Sacramento, Port Costa, Richmond, Oleum, Antioch, San José, Santa Clara, Los Angeles, and a considerable list of other towns. At the beginning the city of San Francisco received a lower rate than any other town because the competition of the water route between New York and San Francisco was most evident. Mr. Stanford, however, disclaimed responsibility for this limitation. His eastern connections, he said, were to blame. The Central Pacific was willing to be more liberal from the start, but the other lines would not join with it in establishing through rates, and insisted on their locals. For this reason goods originating at interior points were often hauled to San Francisco, and then back east, in part over the same line by which they had come.[400] Such a condition was highly unsatisfactory to California towns other than San Francisco, yet by 1873 Sacramento, Marysville, and San José had been given terminal rates,[401] and still later the list of terminal points was very greatly extended. In 1910 there were 152 terminal cities on the Pacific Coast, of which 97 were in California.[402] Dissatisfaction with Rate System