Missouri river cities for rate making to points beyond.[225] The main difficulty with any system of basing points or lines, which so flagrantly violates the distance principle, is first of all to determine at what points to base; and thereafter to accommodate the system to the normal growth and development of the country. The system is inelastic. It tends to break down of its own weight. It must enlarge, if at all, by fits and starts, in each case with violent dislocation of trade. A generation ago towns in Iowa complained that the Mississippi river was a basing line. Then, when the Missouri river line was substituted, an outcry rose from all the points in Nebraska. The persistent complaint from Denver against its rate adjustment as compared with Kansas City,--a competitive distributing centre,--well exemplifies it. The Denver Chamber of Commerce intervenes, and proposes that the basing line be moved from the Missouri river out to Colorado common points (like Denver). Indeed, in each case the argument in favor of the change is identical. Each tier of complainants--thriving cities which have recently come to more or less commercial maturity--plead their inability to compete with the centres adopted some years ago for basing purposes. Denver, for example, wishes to sell goods throughout Utah. But its total charges there on goods purchased in the East amount to eighty cents from Chicago to the Missouri river, plus $1.25 on to Denver, plus $1.64 on to destination,--a sum of $3.69 per hundred pounds. The Kansas City dealer, on the other hand, gets a low base rate of only eighty cents with a single additional rate directly out to Utah of $2.05. In other words, the latter can lay down his goods in Utah for $2.85 as against $3.69 paid by the Denver competitor. The point to be carried forward, however, is not so much the disparity against Denver, as the fact that the moment Denver is promoted to be a basing point it becomes defendant in a complaint of precisely the same sort, brought by the places still further west. This inelasticity of basing point schemes, together with their inability to expand without abrupt dislocations of trade, is apparent everywhere in the South. Just as Chattanooga complains against Nashville, so the little intermediate stations between Chattanooga and Atlanta, as our diagram on page 240 showed, become restive under rates of $1.27 as compared with a rate twenty-one cents lower charged on to Atlanta. The system of basing points or lines may be an inevitable concomitant of industrial immaturity; but it is none the less difficult to defend as a permanent system or as one inherently just. And its final relegation to the scrap heap, in favor of a system of rates graded more or less according to distance, is ardently to be desired.[226] * * * * *