Consider for a moment, if you will, with me the antiquated freight facilities of the heart of what long since became the second city of the world, and which to-day, commercially, at least, is its first. Upon the long, slender island of Manhattan but one steam railroad has direct rail freight facilities. That road is the New York Central, which many years ago pre-empted most of the western edge of the island for itself and so gained a vast strategic advantage--also a choice assortment of political quarrels. However, the one thing probably more than offsets the other. There are nine other important freight railroads, however, entering the New York metropolitan district (not counting the West Shore, which is a subsidiary of the New York Central). These roads, together with the Central and the West Shore, occupy thirty-five vastly valuable piers in the congested sections of the island south of Forty-second Street and so hold the piers from coastwise and from outbound steamship lines which clamor constantly for them. To these piers the freight-cars of these eleven railroads come on long clumsy car-floats, each accommodating about ten cars. The floats are loaded at the direct water terminals of the railroads across the Hudson and elsewhere and are poked by stout tugs into position alongside the freight-piers. In theory a single standard pier of Manhattan should empty and load, even in this rather clumsy fashion, about eighty cars a day. This is based upon having four floats at each of them at a single time. In practice they do well if they clear forty cars a day. The berthings between the piers are narrow, there is much congestion in them and in the rivers about Manhattan Island, and delays are not only frequent but constant. Yet the delays upon the water sides of these piers are as nothing compared with those upon their street sides. Any New York merchant, retail or wholesale, will tell you of these--of trucks standing in line long, weary, expensive hours outside the pier-doors and then wasting more time after they once get inside, before they are loaded and out again. On an average 60 per cent. of a truck's time is so wasted. The average downtown pier is but eighty feet wide, and after a thirty foot roadway has been left down its center there is not much room for the freight. There must be a vast amount of pulling and hauling over the accumulated merchandise. This all takes time and money. Concretely, it costs about two dollars a ton for package-freight (known technically as the classified) to get itself unloaded upon a Manhattan Island pier. Add to this fifty to sixty cents for the hand-work of unloading upon the pier and a hauling cost through the streets of downtown New York of from eight to ten cents a hundred; and you have a total terminal cost well in excess of four dollars a ton, which is entirely too much.