Now come to the present. The freight-rate system of to-day is intricate, fearfully intricate, but it is a system. It begins by classifying all manner of freight into groups, for it must be apparent to any one that to the railroad the cost of handling different commodities must vary tremendously. Several factors make for such variation: the value of the shipment and the degree of risk for its safe transportation that the railroad must assume; its bulk, its weight, and the cost of handling at terminals, as well as the cost of any special equipment that may be necessary to carry it over the rails. No one would expect a railroad to haul a box-car filled with several hundred thousand dollars' worth of silk for the same price that it hauled the same car filled with coke. So the railroad has grouped its freight into six general classes--varying from the most difficult and expensive to handle down to the easiest and the cheapest; and the rates for these six different classes also run in a rough proportion. Some 8,000 articles, ranging from arsenic to step-ladders and from Christmas trees to locomotives, are grouped into these classes. Into them has gone about everything that the railroad will handle, save coal and a few other specialties which are rated as specific commodities and have special published rates. So a man shipping feather dusters from South Brooklyn to Ogdensburg, N. Y., would find that they came under Class 1, and that he would have to pay 44 cents a hundred pounds for the haul. If he was shipping steel beams between the same points he would find them under Class 4 and he would find the tariff at 23 cents a hundred. These six classes have been made standard throughout the country by all the railroads in coöperation. The roads north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi use the so-called Official Classification; south of the Ohio and still east of the Mississippi, the Southern Classification; while all those west of the Mississippi use the Western Classification. So the shipper is no longer in much doubt in these matters, particularly in view of the fact that the three classifications are very much the same in all save minor details. So much for the classification at this moment. It is quite simple when you come to place it beside the tariff sheets themselves, the printed form of an intricate structure, so great as to be almost shadowy in its workings. You ask a freight traffic-manager about rates. He is a skilled man, a man skilled in the economics of common carriers, and he tries his best to explain simply to you the basing charges for the transportation of commodities.