Mr. Spence, director of traffic of the Southern Pacific Company, admitted that effort was made to send business to California via New Orleans when the point of origin was in territory east of a line drawn from Toledo through Indianapolis and Terre Haute to St. Louis.[506] Mr. Lovett thought that Southern Pacific solicitors even in Chicago did not work against the solicitation of lines leading to New Orleans, though acting independently they would solicit business via Ogden.[507] It is in the record, also, that Southern Pacific solicitors in 1914 sought freight from the Atlantic seaboard to Oregon and Nevada through the New Orleans gateway,[508] and that the great bulk of wool from western and central Nevada destined to the Atlantic seaboard actually moved west to Sacramento and then south and east over the Sunset line, instead of taking the direct route via Ogden.[509] Complaints of Others This direct testimony of Southern Pacific employees is in harmony with repeated assertions made by persons outside of the organization, and seems to indicate that some discrimination against the Central Pacific and in favor of the Southern Pacific on transcontinental business was encouraged by those in control of the Southern Pacific Company’s affairs. As well informed a man as P. P. Shelby, traffic manager of the Union Pacific, declared in 1887 that he knew by conversation with shippers that the Central Pacific had diverted all the traffic they could control to the Sunset route ever since the Southern Pacific was completed, commencing in 1882. All kinds of merchandise had been diverted, especially such goods as canned fruits, canned fish, and wool. Asked whether the Union Pacific would carry 25 per cent more freight if the Central Pacific were separated from the Southern Pacific, Mr. Shelby qualified his statement by saying that it was hard to answer the question. The Southern Pacific gave the Central Pacific a good deal of freight which that company would not have received were the two lines segregated. Had they been two independent lines, under independent management, the Southern Pacific would not have given the Central Pacific any freight at all.[510] Similar charges were made by representatives of interests such as those of the English stockholders of the Central Pacific, who asserted that Mr. Huntington wished to ruin the Central Pacific, and dwelt upon the advantages of bankruptcy to a company from which the United States government was about to attempt to collect a debt. Knowing as we do that the Huntington-Stanford group shifted the weight of their investments from the Central to the Southern Pacific in the eighties, there is of course ground for suspicion that the diversion of freight, to which the evidence that has been quoted refers, was part of a carefully thought-out plan, and that more than traffic matters were involved. Real Reasons for Traffic Diversion