In the Chattanooga Case it appeared that rates from New York and other points via South Atlantic points to Chattanooga were higher than to Nashville, 152 miles further on. The Commission in December, 1892, ordered this discrimination to cease. The order was not obeyed. Suit to enforce it was brought in the Circuit Court, and a decision sustaining the Commission was rendered in February, 1898. And in November, 1899, the Court of Appeals confirmed the decision, holding that the ruling of the Supreme Court in the Midland Case did not apply, because “normal competition” would give Chattanooga the same rates as Nashville.[138] But the Supreme Court in 1901 reversed the lower courts and decided against the Commission.[139] The Georgia Railroad Commission Cases, also decided by the Interstate Commission in 1892, went the same way, the United States Supreme Court again deciding against the Interstate Commission on the long and short haul clause, holding that any substantial competition of markets or railways creates dissimilar conditions within the 4th section.[140] The result is that dissimilarity of conditions created by the railroads themselves becomes the means of freeing them from the long-haul rule of the 4th section of the Interstate Act. In the South a method called the “basing-point system” is in vogue. The railroads name certain towns as distributing centres and competing points, fix the rates to and from these points, and make rates to and from other localities by adding to such through rates the local charges in force between the distributing centres, or “basing-points” and the said other localities. The Commission says: “Our annual reports to Congress and reported decisions in cases have uniformly condemned this distributing centre theory of rate-making, but the Southern carriers have resisted our efforts to correct the practice.”[141]