Van Oss says that at one time in this country half the passengers rode on passes.[9] That seems incredible. There is no doubt, however, that the pass evil was enormous before it was checked by State and Federal legislation, and still prevails to an astonishing extent. Six years after the Interstate Act prohibited all preferences, and twenty years after the State crusade against passes and other discriminations began, C. Wood Davis, a railway auditor of large experience, and an executive officer having authority to issue passes, stated that “ten percent of the railway travel of this country is free, the result being that the great mass of railway users are yearly mulcted some $33,000,000 for the benefit of the favored few. No account of these passes is rendered to State, nation, or the confiding stockholders.”[10] If ten percent still ride deadhead, as is quite probable, the resulting tax upon paying railway users is now over $50,000,000 a year. The effect of legislation has been to give the railways an excuse for shutting off the less influential of the former deadheads, while the big people ride free in spite of the law.[11] The Hon. Martin A. Knapp, Chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission, says: “A gentleman told me that on one occasion he came from Chicago to Washington along in the latter days of November, and every passenger in the Pullman car, besides himself, was a member of Congress or other Government official, with their families, and that he was the only passenger who paid a cent for transportation from Chicago to Washington, either for his passage or for his Pullman car.”[12] Paul Morton says: “Passes are given for many reasons, almost all of which are bad.... Passes are given for personal, political, and commercial reasons.”[13] Big shippers and their agents get them as a premium on or inducement to shipments over the donating railroad. When we went to the St. Louis Exposition we had to pay our fare, but the shipping manager of a large firm I have in mind was given free transportation for himself and family, though he was abundantly able to pay. In fact, those best able to pay ride free, while the poor have to pay for the rich as well as for themselves. One way in which the railway managers evade the Interstate Commerce Law, in giving passes to large shippers and others, is to designate the recipients as employees of their own or other companies.[14] President Stickney, of the Chicago and Great Western Railroad, said in a recent address before the Washington Economic Society: