Transportation over undue distances--the carriage of coals to Newcastle in exchange for cotton piece goods hauled to Lancashire--as a product of keen commercial competition may involve both a waste of energy and an enhancement of prices in a manner seldom appreciated. The transportation of goods great distances at low rates, while economically justifiable in opening up new channels of business, becomes wasteful the moment such carriage, instead of creating new business, merely brings about an exchange between widely separated markets, or an invasion of fields naturally tributary to other centres. The wider the market, the greater is the chance of the most efficient production at the lowest cost. The analogy at this point to the problem of protective tariff legislation is obvious. For a country to dispose of its surplus products abroad by cutting prices may not involve economic loss; but for two countries to be simultaneously engaged in "dumping" their products into each other's markets is quite a different matter. In transportation such cases arise whenever a community, producing a surplus of a given commodity, supplies itself, nevertheless, with that same commodity from a distant market. It may not be a just grievance that Iowa, a great cattle raising state, should be forced to procure her dressed meats in Chicago or Omaha;[281] for in this case some degree of manufacture has ensued in these highly specialized centres. But the practice is less defensible where the identical product is redistributed after long carriage to and from a distant point. Arkansas is a great fruit raising region; yet so cheap is transportation that dried fruits, perhaps of its own growing, are distributed by wholesale grocers in Chicago throughout its territory. The privilege of selling rice in the rice-growing states from Chicago is, however, denied by the Southern Railway Association.[282] An illuminating example of similar character occurs in the Southern cotton manufacture, as described by a Chicago jobber: "Right in North Carolina there is one mill shipping 60 carloads of goods to Chicago in a season, and a great many of these same goods are brought right back to this very section.... I might add that when many of these heavy cotton goods made in this southeastern section are shipped both to New York and Chicago and then sold and reshipped South, they pay 15 cents to 20 cents per hundred less each way to New York and back than _via_ Chicago. This doubles up the handicap against which Chicago is obliged to contend and renders the unfairness still more burdensome."[283] The overweening desire of the large centres to enter every market is well exemplified by recent testimony of the Chicago jobbers.[284]