We had hardly passed the crisis of the effort to level down, when some of the more intelligent railroad men made an effort to level up. Recognizing that discriminations and fluctuating rates were an evil, they sought to avoid it by common action with regard to the business at competing points. A mere agreement as to rates to be charged was not enough to secure this end. Such an agreement was sure to be violated. Even if the leading authorities meant to observe it, their agents could always evade its requirements to some extent. Such evasion was favored by loose arrangements between connecting roads, and by the somewhat irresponsible system of fast freight lines. Wherever it existed, it gave rise to mutual suspicion. _A_ believed that his road did it because he could not help it, but that _B_ and _C_ were allowing their roads to do it maliciously; while _B_ and _C_ had the same consciousness of individual rectitude and the same unkind suspicions with regard to _A_. It was at best a rather hollow truce, which did not really accomplish its purpose, and which might change to open war on very slight provocation. To avoid this difficulty a pool, or division of traffic, was arranged. It is a fact that, whatever wars of rates there may be, the percentage of traffic carried by the different lines varies but little. If an arbitrator can examine the books and decide what these percentages have been in the past, he can make an award for the future, under which the competitive traffic of the different roads may be fairly divided. The arrangements for doing this are various. Sometimes the roads carry such traffic as may happen to be offered, and settle the differences with one another by money balances; sometimes they actually divert traffic from one line to another. But the advantage of either of these arrangements over a mere agreement to maintain rates is that they cannot be violated without direct action on the part of the leading authorities of the roads concerned--either in open withdrawal, or in actual bad faith. The ordinary irregularities of agents do not, under a pooling system, give rise to much suspicion, because they do not benefit the road in whose behalf they are undertaken. Its percentage being fixed there is no motive for rate-cutting. So great is this advantage that pooling is accepted in almost all other countries as a natural means of maintaining equality of rates; the state railroads of Central Europe entering into such contracts with competing private lines and even with water-routes. In America itself, pools have had a longer and wider history than is generally supposed. In New England they arose and continued to exist on a moderate scale without attracting much attention. In the Mississippi Valley, the Chicago-Omaha pool was arranged as early as 1870, and formed the model for a whole system of such arrangements extending as far as the Pacific Coast. But, as involving wider