The fear of confiscation does not seem to be well founded on the part of the railroads; there is more to justify such a fear on the part of companies and localities unfairly treated by the railroads. The Commission will have no motive to make confiscatory orders, and the courts will protect the roads from everything that is doubtful in the slightest degree as they have done in the past. The real danger of confiscation of values lies in leaving the railroads free to make such orders as those in the San Antonio case or the Kansas oil case which destroyed the business of independent operators. Adding 25 cents a ton to the coal rates from San Antonio practically confiscated the coal mines at that point, and raising the oil rates in Kansas from 10 to 17 cents practically confiscated, during the continuation of the order, the product of the independent oil wells. That some disturbance of tariffs and business might result from conferring the rate-fixing power on a public board is quite likely. There is a good deal of business that ought to be disturbed; that of the Beef Trust and the Oil Trust for example would be the better for a thorough house-cleaning. And the tariffs need considerable disturbance to bring them into close relations with the principles of justice. But the disturbance _might_ be more than is needful. Our railroads say that Government boards the world over show a tendency to adopt some sort of a mileage basis, in the shape of a zone system or some other form of distance tariff. This would interfere with the equalization of rates, which is one of the best elements in American railroading. The fruits of California are carried all over the country at low blanket rates that enable them to be sold in every hamlet in the country at prices the common people can afford to pay. New England shoes are carried to St. Louis at 1½ cents a pair and to San Francisco for 2 cents a pair. Milk is brought into the cities at the same rate for many miles out. So with the pulp mills in the forests of New York, Vermont, and Maine. The railroads give them all equal rates to the great cities. When the big mill at Millinocket, Me., was being planned the promoters went to the railroads for rates. To make the product cheap they must build on a large scale, and to justify this they must be able to reach many markets; they must be able to supply newspapers in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. So the railroads gave them rates that enabled them to send their paper 1,500 miles to Chicago and sell it to newspapers there at the same price they would have to pay for paper that came only 500 miles.[408] This destroys nature’s discriminations due to distance, and places men on an equality in the market to win by their merits, not by natural advantages or disadvantages of location. This is in many ways a beneficent process and if the railways did not create new artificial discriminations of their own they would be entitled to be