The disability against Chattanooga, against which it protested, was substantial.[215] Its first-class rate from New York was $1.14 per hundred pounds, while Nashville paid only ninety-one cents. On various commodities the Chattanooga rates were from twenty-five to seventy-five per cent, above those to Nashville. The effect of such differences upon jobbing business at the places intermediate between Nashville and Chattanooga is shown by the subjoined chart. The two upper sloping lines represent the through rates from New York to each distributing centre, plus the local rates out to way stations. Even at Bolivar, the nearest place to Chattanooga, the Nashville combination is slightly lower than that based upon Chattanooga. This disability steadily increases as Nashville is approached, rates from Chattanooga rising while those from Nashville fall, until at Kimbro the jobber located at Chattanooga--the nearer point to New York on the direct line--must lay down his New York goods at a rate of sixty-three cents a hundred pounds higher than his competitor in Nashville enjoys. This adjustment is partly an historical product. Nashville, by the old river routes from Pittsburg down the Ohio and up the Cumberland, was formerly nearer the Eastern cities than Chattanooga. Then, the trunk lines through Cincinnati with heavy traffic and low rates shortened the distance; and, finally, the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, supplanting the river routes, undertook to build up Nashville as against Cincinnati and Louisville. Historically, on the other hand, Chattanooga was long an unimportant point. It took, as it still does, the same rate from the North as prevailed at some twenty-three other southern cities from Atlanta to Memphis. Here is the crux of the difficulty. The rates at Nashville must be assumed as historically fixed. Whatever remedy may apply must come from a reduction of the rates to Chattanooga, the nearer point. This place has now become an important centre, the meeting point of a number of rail and water lines. The long prevalent grouping of all the southern cities with equal rates from the North must be replaced by a system of differentials, if the discrimination against Chattanooga is ever to be ameliorated.