rate, what is the use of it unless it can schedule to its judgment a minute specification of the quantity and quality of service to be rendered in return for that rate? And it would have to schedule also the price level, the crops, and all the conditions of home and foreign markets and adjust the rate on a sliding scale, else the rate that is reasonable now may become very unreasonable in a few weeks or months from now. And if, instead of this patchwork, the public board attempts to revise the tariff as a whole and fix the services to be rendered, it will either get itself captured by the railroads or it will cripple railroad enterprise. Railroad men are not going to work with much spirit if you take the control of rates and service out of their hands, and if you leave them control of either they will have you instead of your having them. It always means a struggle for mastery where a body that does not own seeks to control. The body that owns and has possession will evade, pervert, defy if possible, and if overborne will lose initiative and energy and take on the air of a conquered province. The case is no better in respect to discrimination. In the first place it is clear that, as railroad managers have testified, it would be just as easy to cut rates made by a commission as to disregard the rates made by the railways and published by them and thereby made obligatory under the law. Mr. J. H. Hiland, head of the traffic department of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul, says: “I can cut a rate or give a rebate on a rate fixed by a commission just as easily as though I had made the rate myself.”[413] Mr. W. D. Hines, till recently Vice-President of the Louisville and Nashville, says: “The Townsend Bill made no provision whatever which looked to the prevention of rebates. It provided that the Commission should fix rates, but there would have been the same facilities and the same inducements to cut the rates made by the Commission as to cut the rates established by the railroads.”[414] President Tuttle of the Boston and Maine puts the case in this way. “A big shipper says to the managers of the A, B, & C railroads ‘Give me a cut rate.’ They refuse. Pretty soon all P’s business is going by the X line. The A, B, & C folks notice that they are losing traffic and they say ‘Look here, where’s all that business we used to get? The X line is getting it all. P’s got a concession over there!’ Maybe he has and maybe he hasn’t, but you can’t make those fellows on A, B, & C believe that he hasn’t. They go to P and say: ‘What are you giving all your business to the X line for?’ P says, ‘Well, I asked you to give me a lower rate and you wouldn’t do it.’ He don’t say he’s got a lower rate on X, and maybe he hasn’t, but the effect on A, B, & C is the same as if he had. They say, ‘What do you want?’ P says, ‘Give me 2 cents a hundred off the rate and I’ll distribute my business as I did before.’ So they give him 2 cents off and they get the tonnage.”