Paradoxical as it may seem, a certain rigidity of rate schedules is a natural consequence of the very delicacy with which individual rates are adjusted to meet the demands of trade. Each road is jealously and aggressively alert to protect its own constituency regardless of the rights of others. No single traffic manager is free to grant reductions of rates, even when considered to be just, by reason of the opposition of competing lines. The consent of every one of these interests is necessary in order to insure stability, and the penalty for acting independently may be a rate war, disastrously affecting relations with connecting lines. Thus, for example, in the South the Southern Railway for some time was willing to concede, as a measure of justice, a reduction of rates on cotton from Mississippi river points to the mills in North and South Carolina.[127] The growth of the textile industry had resulted in a demand for cotton far exceeding the production of the Carolinas. At the same time the increasing attention devoted to manufacturing of a higher grade had forced the manufacturers to draw upon the long-staple supplies of the Mississippi bottom lands. The Piedmont cotton was too short in fibre for the finer sort of goods. The Carolina mills were, however, compelled to pay a higher rate upon cotton from such points as Memphis than was paid for the long haul up to New England. Thus, for instance, as late as 1900, rates were fifty-nine cents to South Carolina, while they were only fifty-five and one-half cents per hundred pounds from the same points to New England mills. This was obviously unjust. But the Southern Railway alone, interested in the welfare of its Carolina clients, was powerless to act without the consent of its competitors operating from Memphis west of the Alleghanies. These latter lines, having no interest in the southern mills and a unity of interest in the long haul traversed to New England, sought to prevent an equalization of the differences. Controlling rates also on cotton for export to various seaports, they were for a long time able to prevent a change. On the other hand, in the same territory the railways operating south from Cincinnati and Louisville desired to reduce rates on manufactured products from the Central West.[128] These were the very lines which in the former instance prevented the reduction of cotton rates on the Southern Railway to Carolina points, by threats to meet such reductions by cutting their own rates on cotton going north through the Ohio gateways. Yet a reduction of their rates on manufactures for building up western trade threatened the business of the Southern Railway, which had been mainly interested in the traffic from Atlanta seaboard points. It may readily be seen that this situation, extending to practically every important point, "jacked up" all these rates, not because of their inherent reasonableness and not even because the railways