Our Interstate Commission has, I believe, shown too little appreciation of this fact, too much tendency to insist that a town or city is entitled to the benefit of its geographical position. It is entitled to the benefit of its geographical position to the extent that no place more distant from its market should have lower rates to and from that market, but the right to claim that the rates shall not be equal is very questionable, and frequently it is clear that no such right exists. The Commission has recognized this point in several cases. For example, in the Business Men’s Association of St. Louis _v._ the Santa Fe, Northern Pacific, Union Pacific, and other roads,[409] the Commission sustained a blanket rate on many commodities from the Pacific Coast to all points east of the Missouri River. And in the Orange Rate Case[410] decided last year, a blanket rate of $1 per hundred on lemons from Southern California to all points east of the Missouri was approved. In the milk case, however, it held that “A blanket rate on milk on all the Delaware, Lackawanna’s lines, New Haven road, Reading, Erie, New York Central, and West Shore and other roads regardless of distance, viz., 32 cents on milk and 50 cents on cream per can of 40 quarts, is unjust to producers and shippers of the nearer points. There should be at least four divisions of stations,—the first extending 40 miles from the terminal in New Jersey, the second covering a distance of 60 miles and ending about 100 miles from such terminal, and the third covering the next 90 miles, and the fourth covering stations more than 190 miles from the terminal. The rates on milk in 40–quart cans should not exceed 23 cents from the first group of stations, 26 cents from the second group, 29 cents from the third, and the present rate of 32 cents from the fourth group.”[411] It is quite possible that the Commission made a mistake in this case, though it is not easy for any but a railroad man, with a ravenous appetite for tonnage and reckless of the waste of economic power, to see any sense in arranging rates so as to take milk to New York from points near Buffalo while Buffalo gets milk from places east of points shipping to New York; but if the Commission did fall into error in this case, the mistake of refusing to allow the distant man to come into the metropolitan market on equal terms with the nearer man is nothing compared to the mistake the railroads so frequently commit of allowing some Chicago or Kansas City man to come into New York at lower rates than the New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New England producers have to pay.