Such inequalities existed on a large scale: and they were all the more difficult to deal with because there was a certain reason for some of them arising from the nature of railroad business. The expenses of a railroad are of two kinds. Some, like train and station service, locomotive fuel, or repairs of rolling-stock, are pretty directly chargeable to the different parts of the traffic. It costs a certain amount in wages and in materials to run a particular train; if that train is taken off, that part of the expense is saved. But there is another class of items, known as fixed charges, that do not vary with the amount of business done. Interest on bonds must be paid, whether the volume of traffic be large or small. The services of track-watchmen must be paid for, whether there be a hundred trains daily or only a dozen. In short, most of the expenses for interest and maintenance of way are chargeable to the business as a whole, but not to particular pieces of work done. The practical inference from this is obvious. In order that the railroad as a whole may be profitable, the fixed charges must be paid somehow. The railroad manager will try to get them as he can from different parts of his traffic. But if, for any reason, a particular piece of business cannot or will not pay its share of the fixed charges, it is better to secure it at any price above the bare expense of loading and hauling, without regard to the fixed charges. For if the business is lost, these charges will run on just the same, without any added means of meeting them. The consequence is that there is no natural standard of rates; or, rather, that there are two standards, so far apart that the difference between the two is quite sufficient to build up one establishment or one locality and ruin another, in case of an arbitrary exercise of power on the part of the freight-agent. In the use of such a power it was inevitable that there should be a great many mistakes, and some things which were worse than mistakes. Colbert once cynically defined taxation as "the art of so plucking the goose as to secure the largest amount of feathers with the least amount of squealing." Some of our freight-agents have taken Colbert's tax theories as a standard, and have applied them only too literally. It is this short-sighted policy which has made the system of charging "what the traffic will bear" a synonyme for extortion. Interpreted rightly, this phrase represents a sound principle of railroad policy--putting the burden of the fixed charges on the shipments that can afford to pay them. But practically--in the popular mind at least--it has come to mean almost exactly the opposite.