commercial competition between it and the place more distant. An important feature in commercial competition is its entire dissociation from all considerations of cost of service by long or short routes. Neither strong nor weak lines make the rate. The business is there. Market conditions are fixed. The carriers are free to take traffic or leave it. Single-handed, at least they cannot rule the price of transportation. The price of sugar at Kansas City is made by competition of Louisiana sugar coming from New Orleans, of beet sugar and Hawaiian sugar from Colorado and San Francisco, and of the world's sugar from New York. This is why Kansas City, in the complaint stated in the opening paragraph, enjoys a lower rate on sugar from San Francisco than the transcontinental lines can accord to Denver. The only possible justification for the apparent anomaly in lumber rates from Texas points, cited in the same paragraph, is that, as the heart of the Middle West is approached, lumber supplies from every point of the compass converge upon common markets. As is so frequently averred in such cases, no carrier makes the rate. The rate is made for all of them by conditions beyond their control. The only rates, therefore, which it is in their power to fix in some accordance with average costs of operation, are the rates at local stations. For these rates alone can they be brought to book. Just here another characteristic of commercial competition as distinct from rivalry of routes is to be noted. Local discrimination, wherever it is alleged to occur, frequently assumes the form of complaint against rates to various places, not on the same line but by different and often widely separated lines. Complaints of this class might arise, for instance, referring back to our diagrams of the oyster cases, between X and Z. Philadelphia, we will assume, as before, to be the common market. A multitude of different varieties of protest are distinguishable. Point X equally distant from Philadelphia with Z may pay a higher rate than Z. Or X may be less distant than Z, and yet be called upon to pay the same rate. It may even be less distant than Z and yet actually be charged a higher rate than Z. But in all these instances the two points (X and Z) are not on the same route, but on divergent routes. The issue remains the same. The conditions imposed at the point of convergence being fixed, each line must exercise its own ingenuity in conforming thereto. Methods in each case must differ, according to the length of line, the direction and composition of the traffic, and other factors. * * * * *