“Having gotten through, Senator, with the lines between Chicago and New York, we said perhaps this is not a fair sample. Now, we will go up in the Northwest, and we will take the lines that carry flour from Minneapolis east. We instituted another investigation, and we put the railroad and the traffic men of the millers on the stand, and they all swore without exception that the rates were absolutely maintained. One traffic official there, when it got a little bit too hot for him, became sick enough so that he threw up his dinner, but he did not throw up the truth. We could not get the admission from any man there that they had ever paid a rebate. We said, ‘This does for the East; now let us go West.’ So we went into the Pacific Coast, to Portland, Oregon, and went over exactly the same performance there. We made one man admit that he burned up his books rather than present them to the Commission, but we could obtain no admission of the payment of any rebate there.” But the St. Louis Southwestern Traffic Committee or Traffic Association employed a young man by the name of Camden and instructed him to lay before the Interstate Commission any evidence he got of the payment of rebates. “He had not been there more than two or three weeks before he found some evidence to the effect that the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad had been departing from the published rate, and he came up to Washington and laid that evidence before the Interstate Commerce Commission, and we began proceedings against the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. That was the first instance from the time I came onto the Commission that we could obtain any evidence of a departure from the published rate. We directed the Baltimore and Ohio road to file a statement showing what shipments they had made during a certain time, and the rate of freight paid them for the transportation. Thereupon they filed a statement showing a great many departures from the published rate. At the same time they sent to the Interstate Commerce Commission a letter. They said in that letter in substance, that the roads in the territory in which they operated had habitually departed from the published rate; that was after they had sworn they maintained the published rate in that territory: ‘Now, for us, the receivers of the Baltimore and Ohio, we have gotten through, but we cannot maintain the rate unless our competitors maintain the rate. We propose from this time on to maintain the rate ourselves, and we propose to see that they maintain it; but in order that we may do that, we ask you to call a conference of the railroad presidents in trunk-line territory.’