The classification of all these articles is a factor of primary importance in the making of freight rates both from a public and private point of view. Attention has been directed of late to its significance and importance to the private shipper, by reason of the use made of it in the advances of freight rates which have taken place throughout the country within the past decade. Its public importance has not been fully appreciated until recently as affecting the general level of railway charges. So little was its significance understood, that supervision and control of classification were not apparently contemplated by the original Act to Regulate Commerce of 1887. The anomaly existed for many years, therefore, of a grant of power intended to regulate freight rates, which, at the same time, omitted provision for control over a fundamentally important element in their make-up. The Interstate Commerce Commission, however, assumed jurisdiction over the matter: and for more than twenty years, despite doubts expressed by the Department of Justice as to its legality, passed upon complaints as to unreasonable classification without protest even from the carriers themselves. Control over it has now been assured beyond possibility of dispute by the specific provisions of the Hepburn Act of 1910. The freight rate upon a particular commodity between any given points is compounded of two separate and distinct factors: one having to do with the nature of the haul, the other with the nature of the goods themselves. Two distinct publications must be consulted in order to determine the actual charge. Although both of them usually bear the name of a railway and are issued over its signature, they emanate, nevertheless, from entirely different sources. The first of these is known as the Freight Tariff. It specifies rates in cents per hundred pounds for a number of different classes of freight, numerically designated, between all the places upon each line or its connections. Thus the tariff of the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad gives rates per hundred pounds from New York to several hundred stations, for first, second, third, etc., classes. This freight tariff, however, contains no mention whatever of commodities by name. The second publication which must be consulted supplies this defect. This is known as the Classification. Its function is to group all articles more or less alike in character, so far as they affect transportation cost, or are affected in value by carriage from place to place. These groups correspond to the several numerical classes already named in the freight tariff. Thus dry goods or boots and shoes are designated as first class. Turning back to the freight tariff, the rate from New York, for example, to any particular place desired, for such first-class freight, is then found in cents per hundred pounds. It thus appears, as has been said, that a freight rate is made up of two distinct elements equal in importance.