It has been suggested that a great step in advance would be to have all the roads in the United States unite and put all cars into a common stock and let them be distributed, record kept of movements, and mileage paid through a general clearing house. This would practically form a single rolling-stock company owned by the roads contributing their cars to it. It could gradually introduce uniform patterns of construction, improved couplers, and air-brakes, and could concentrate cars in different sections of the country in large numbers as different crops required movement, thus avoiding the blockades which often occur in one section while cars are superabundant in another. Consolidations usually render more efficient and cheaper service than separate organizations can do, and this may come about in the course of time.[18] We have now seen how the road is maintained and its trains safely handled. The next step in order is to see how business is secured and the rates to be charged are fixed. This department may be controlled by a traffic manager, with two assistants--the general freight agent and the general passenger agent--or the officers may report directly to the general manager without the intervention of a traffic manager. But it would be a more accurate expression to say, not that these officers "fix" the rates, for if they did few railroads would ever fail, but that they accept and announce the rates that are fixed by conditions of competition between different markets and products, and between different railroads and water lines. Among these complex forces a railroad freight agent is nearly as powerless to regulate rates as a professor of grammar is to regulate the irregularities of English verbs. He can accept them and use them, or he may let them alone, but the irregularities will remain, all the same. There is no eccentricity, for example, more idiotic or indefensible to the ordinary citizen than a habit railroads have of sometimes charging less money for a long haul than they charge for a shorter haul. Yet I believe there is not a railroad line in the United States which will not be found guilty of this apparent folly of charging "less for the long haul" if its rates to distant points are followed far enough. For if followed far enough we shall come to the ocean, and find the railroad accepting business between two seaports. For instance, all railroads running westward from New York through some of their connections finally reach San Francisco, and compete for freight between these ports. But the rates they are able to obtain are limited by steamers using the ocean for a highway, and sailing vessels using the wind for motive power, and able to carry heavy freights at one-tenth the average cost to railroads across mountains and deserts. This average cost must fix the average rates charged by the railroads to intermediate points, such as to Ogden, in Utah. So the railroad must either charge less