The jobbing or wholesale business of the United States exemplifies the most highly involved and complex details of commercial competition.[91] In this field it appears most clearly that, as is so often alleged, railway traffic managers hold the welfare of entire communities, as it were, in the palms of their hands. In all the cases heretofore cited, great natural forces outweighed the purely personal and human ones. Soil, climate and mineral resources more or less completely determined the final outcome of commercial competition. But the distributive business of a country is more largely artificial. It is more subject to human control, and may be influenced by personal considerations. Shall the economically dependent southern planter be supplied with manufactures of all sorts,--from harnesses to tin dippers--from mid-western cities like Cincinnati and Chicago or from eastern centres, such as New York and Baltimore? This is the underlying economic issue raised in the notable Cincinnati Freight Bureau Case in 1894; in the course of whose determination the Supreme Court of the United States raised the more immediate and pressing question of the authority of the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate rates at all. In the dust raised by the controversy over this purely legal question, the basic economic dispute was lost to view.[92] Shall the people of the Pacific slope be supplied with hardware and analogous products from their own large cities which buy at wholesale from the East, break bulk at San Francisco or Seattle and ship out to smaller towns in less than carload lots; or shall the distribution take place at the hands of jobbing houses located several thousand miles away at Chicago or St. Louis? This is the economic dispute raised in the St. Louis Business Men's League case.[93] The very existence of San Francisco as a commercial centre may depend upon it. For the primary and secondary operations of commerce are often complementary. At the large cities, concentration of raw staples moving inward naturally entails back loads outward at low rates for manufactured goods distributed by jobbers. Or, taking the smaller places, the farmer will of necessity buy his cotton cloth, sugar and coal in the town to which he drives by wagon to deliver his cotton, corn or wheat.[94]