placed among the great equalizers of the age. Years ago there was a vigorous argument about the rates on wire from Worcester, Mass., to Chicago, and from Pittsburg to Chicago. The wire mills of Worcester had a good business, employing some 5,000 men, and marketing mostly in the West. Mills were built in Pittsburg, and being much nearer Chicago got a lower rate to that city. The New York Central at once met the rates so that the Worcester Mills could get to market on a level with the Pittsburg people, who still had the advantage of nearness to the coal and iron mines. Not satisfied with this, however, they carried the question to the Traffic Association, claiming that as they were 500 miles nearer Chicago, they should have a lower freight rate than the Worcester mills. But they didn’t get it. The New York Central said: “Here are 5,000 men at work in Worcester. What are they going to do if we let you crowd them out of Chicago, which is their principal market? We shall stand by them and meet any rate you make from Pittsburg.” That was fine, as good as the raising of a rate to kill the San Antonio mine was bad; the railroads can save industrial life as well as commit industrial murder. It is said that government rate-fixing would not meet such cases; that the principle of equalization is not recognized, and both justice and business development would suffer thereby. It is not true that government rate-fixers do not recognize the equalization principle. The national post-office has carried it to the limit, and has based its business upon it to such an extent that it is known as the post-office principle. It is applied in government telegraph and telephone systems much more fully than in our private systems. Even the State railways make considerable use of it. Although the tendency is to adopt some sort of distance system as the main basis of the tariff, there is constant recognition in Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Switzerland, and the Australasian States, and it is announced as a definite policy that so far as reasonably possible rival industries shall be placed on an equality in the market. “We mean to bring the manufacturer who is 100 miles away into the market on a level with the man who is 10 miles away,” said the manager of one of these government systems to me, and there is more or less of the same spirit and purpose in all the government systems I am acquainted with. The fact is that a movement toward the equalization of rates through application of the principle to one commodity after another, or the gradual extension of zone distances in a zone tariff, offers the only hope of attaining a really just and scientific system of rates. Any sudden adoption of such a system would disturb the values of real estate, etc., beyond all reason, but it can be gradually approached, and that is what the railroads in this and other countries are doing.