That Spokane case, also a famous decision of the Interstate Commerce Commission, shows another factor in railroad rate-making, the serious influence of water competition. Indirectly it also includes the principle of the back haul. Spokane, which is much nearer Chicago than Seattle, was, like St. Albans, paying a higher rate for the "short haul" than Seattle was paying for a much longer haul. But Seattle is a prosperous port, and if the railroad did not make a very low rate to it, all the slow freight would go to it by water, where much lower transportation expense invariably makes much lower rates, and the railroad, to save its own skin, as it were, must make a low through rate there, charging a back haul or higher rate to Spokane from the large eastern points. If it charged Spokane a proportionate rate of the one to Seattle, which would then be lower, all the other inland towns would demand the same privilege, and the railroad would then be hauling property at a loss--a business which can have but one inevitable result. "You see how complicated it all is," the traffic manager tells the young Secretary, "and how we must use judgment all the while. We've got to figure individual cost for certain distances and localities and directions of traffic, figure in the varying cost of handling different sorts of freight, and then put in a percentage of the general cost of the business, just as the restaurant-keeper makes each patron pay proportionately for the cost of bread and butter, heat, light, service and rent, no matter how large or how small his check may be on any one occasion. "We must use judgment, and we must make rates to keep the goods moving all the while. Suppose that both nails and crowbars are made in Pittsburgh and only nails are made at Williamsport. Suppose then that the rate from Pittsburgh to New York for both crowbars and nails is fifty cents a hundred, but that the rate from Williamsport to New York was but 38 cents. What chance would the nail manufacturer in Pittsburgh have against his competitor in Williamsport, when both men are making annually nails in tens of thousands of tons? It is to help the Pittsburgh man that we make a special 38-cent rate on nails from his town to New York; and when we keep filing these commodity rates at Washington, your shippers ask why we can't have a standard rate-sheet, or the Australian system. The next time some one of them finds that he cannot sell plough shares in Texas because a man down in Fort Wayne has him beaten on standard rates, you watch him hurry here and ask for a special one. "It is out of this clamor and contention of almost myriad interests, the ambitions of just such thriving little cities as your own, out of the skilled arguments of brainy men that the rate-sheet is born and kept living in a state of perpetual healthy change."