In addition to the passengers who travel free on passes, there are many who have free transportation in other forms. One method of favoritism is the payment of rebates, which are in use in the passenger departments as well as in the freight departments of our railroads. Passenger rebates are repayments of a part or the whole of the amounts paid by favored parties for tickets or mileage. For example, large concerns that employ travelling men buy ordinary passenger mileage books, and when the mileage is used the cover of the book is returned to the railroad and a refund is made.[17] In the investigation of the Wisconsin railroads, instituted by Governor La Follette in 1903, it was found that every railroad of importance in the State had been paying passenger rebates in large amounts every year for the whole six years that were covered by the search. From 1897 to the end of 1903 the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul refunded $170,968 in passenger rebates, the Chicago and Northwestern refunded $614,361; adding the Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis and Omaha, the Wisconsin Central, and the “Soo Line,” the total passenger rebates paid by the five roads named in the said time was over $972,000. In the case of some favored shippers in Wisconsin it was found that the railroads secretly refunded the entire original cost of the mileage books bought by the said shippers for themselves or their agents, or $60 per book. So that these favored houses “were able to send out their entire force of travelling men without paying one cent of railroad fare, while their competitors paid full fares.” One of these Wisconsin concerns, the Northern Grain Company, received from the Northwestern Railroad alone $151,447 rebates in five years, or over $30,000 a year, partly as refunds on the passenger mileage books of their travelling men and partly as cash rebates on their business. The president of the Northern Grain Company is O. W. Mosher, who was a State senator in 1901 and 1903 and fought the railroad reforms proposed by Governor La Follette. He vigorously defended “individual liberty” and the right of the railroads to “control their own property,” and it is easy to understand his earnest opposition to railroad regulation since it has come out that “individual liberty” and railroad _laissez faire_ meant $30,000 a year to his company. _The Deadhead Passenger Car._ Along with the less-than-carload lots of deadheads travelling on trip passes or annual passes, or transportation with a rebate attachment, there are carload lots going deadhead in private passenger cars.