In 1896 the railroads carried Minneapolis flour to New York for 10 cents a hundred, while charging New York State millers 18 cents a hundred to New York City. President Stickney of the Chicago and Great Western Railroad, in a discussion the same year with the representatives of other western roads before the I. C. C., said: “You charge the Kansas and Nebraska farmer 13 cents to haul his grain 200 miles while you charge the grain dealer 6 cents to haul that same grain twice as far to Chicago.... I have been acquainted with this northwestern country for thirty-five years. In all that time there has never been a year that the corn crop was moved until after the corn was in the hands of dealers who had the rate. Once the farmer is compelled to sell his grain, then you fellows cut the rate for the dealer.” That is, the railroads charge the farmer shipping to the Missouri River a mileage rate 4 times as high as the rate to the dealers shipping to Chicago, and freeze out the small dealers from shipping to Chicago by making secret rates in favor of the big dealers. Coal was shipped from Chicago to Omaha and then reshipped to Grinnell, Ia., 225 miles back toward Chicago, more cheaply than it could be got direct from Chicago. “A large manufacturing establishment located in the latter town, making agricultural implements which were sold principally on the Pacific Coast, found it advantageous to abandon its plant and transfer its machinery and employees to Chicago on account of the unfavorable rates. “A large factory for making barbed wire, located in the city of Des Moines, in like manner abandoned its buildings and transferred its establishment to Chicago, finding that it saved a large sum on every carload of wire it shipped, although the wire was mainly carried directly by or through its old location, 300 miles nearer the Pacific Coast than Chicago.”[117] To certain towns in Nebraska and other States the railways have extended the same rates that apply to Missouri River points, where the rates to Chicago are very low, while other towns in the same region have to pay the Missouri River rates to and from Chicago, plus the local rate from the river point.[118]