The road A B has two connections, C and D, to reach E. It sells tickets over each at the same rate, and stands neutral between them. But C agrees with A's ticket-seller that he will give him a dollar for every ticket he can sell over C's line. D finds that he is losing travel, and offers, privately, a larger commission. Neither knows what the other is doing. The ticket-seller gets his regular salary from A, and from C and D often enormous sums as commissions, and is interested, not in sending ignorant travellers over the line which might suit them best, but over the one paying him the largest secret commission. This should be held as against public policy, because it tends to prevent reductions in rates to the public by robbing the roads of much of their revenue, and it also demoralizes the officers who handle a business which is practically but the giving away of large sums of money as bribes. There is another practice in the passenger business which is unfair at the best and is the source of many abuses. It is charging the same to the man with no baggage as to the man with a Saratoga trunk. If the baggage service were specially organized as a trunk express, it could be more efficiently handled and without any "baggage smashing," while the total cost of travelling to persons with baggage would be no more than at present, and to those without, much less. As an illustration of the sort of abuses to which it is now liable, I may cite a single case. I have known a merchant buy a lot of twenty trunks for his trade, pack them all full of dry-goods, check them to a city 1,000 miles away by giving a few dollars to baggage-men, and himself buy a single ticket and go by a different route. The roads which handled that baggage imagined that it belonged to their passengers, and were never the wiser. While the baggage service is free, no efficient checks can be provided against such frauds. Essential parts of both freight and passenger departments are the soliciting agents. They are like the cavalry pickets and scouts of an army, scattered far and wide over the country and looking after the interests of their lines, making personal acquaintances of all shippers and travellers, advertising in every possible manner, and reporting constantly all that the enemy--the rival lines--are doing, and often a great deal that they are not. For the great railroad wars usually begin in local skirmishes brought on by the zeal of these pickets when the officers in command would greatly prefer to live in peace.