In another part of the hearing, Mr. Field said to Mr. Biddle: “Can you say, Mr. Biddle, how it happened that you issued a circular to your subordinates in which you said, with reference to these coal rates, ‘To be billed at figures furnished by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, which include the freight rates and the price of coal; the rates issued in the regular tariffs to be the minimum’?” “MR. BIDDLE. Yes, sir. “MR. FIELD. Will you tell us? “MR. BIDDLE. It is because the railroads—the Western railroads particularly—I don’t know whether the Eastern roads do it or not—have been engaged in the reprehensible occupation of serving as a collecting agency for the coal companies, and those particular instructions were given so that the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company could sell coal to John Smith at a given place and charge him $1.25 and somebody else $1.50 for that same coal.”[189] When the document was presented in evidence before the Interstate Commerce Commission, counsel for the railway objected to its introduction on the ground that it had been stolen. Morawetz says that the rate agreement in respect “to shipments to the El Paso and Southwestern was a three-cornered arrangement made in New York in 1901 between the Colorado Fuel Company, the Santa Fe, and Phelps, Dodge & Co., who operated large copper mines and controlled the El Paso and Southwestern Railway.”[190] Paul Morton, who was then the head of the Santa Fe traffic department, says that in 1901 the people interested in smelting and mining in Southern Arizona and Northern Mexico threatened to use Eastern coke or build a coal railroad of their own unless lower prices were made on the coal and coke they were receiving at El Paso and Deming. They were large consumers, and their threat menaced a traffic worth nearly a million dollars a year to the Atchison system. To protect its interests the Santa Fe entered into an agreement with the Fuel Company and the El Paso and Southwestern people the terms of which were that the Fuel Company was to supply coal at $1.15 a ton, and the Santa Fe was to haul the coal to El Paso and Deming “at the very low rate of $2.90 per ton, which was in reality a division of rate, not usually published.” And “the Southwestern people were to pay $4.05 for the coal which was to be used by the railroad itself and the industries along its line.”[191]