If these rank discrepancies in the manhandling of rates by the various states affected only their own territories it would be quite bad enough. Unfortunately they play sad and constant havoc with the interstate rates.[19] These are delicate and builded, many times, upon local or state conditions. And this despite the fact that the vast majority of freight traffic is interstate, rather than intrastate. The majority of the grain from the farm lands of Nebraska or Minnesota is not destined for Omaha in the one case, or Minneapolis in the other; yet these sovereign states take upon their solemn shoulders the regulating of grain rates--to the ultimate discomfiture and cost of the other portions of the land. I have but to refer you to Justice Hughes's decision in the so-called Minnesota rate case. He showed how this arbitrary local outgrowth of the obsolete doctrine of states' rights worked to the utter and absolute detriment of the nation as a whole. And yet in the six long years while that case was pending the Great Northern and Northern Pacific companies lost more than $3,000,000--a sum of money never to be recovered from their shippers--as a result of the state's unsustained reductions in freight rates.[20] No better argument has ever been framed for the nationalization of our railroads, for making the powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission absolute and supreme. * * * * * No wonder, then, that the railroaders are praying that a way may be found and found soon for lifting the entire authority over them out of the hands of the forty-five present state boards of control--who never have agreed and who apparently can never be made to agree on any one form of procedure--and placing it in the hands of the very competent regulating board down at Washington, enlarged and strengthened for its new burdens. The Interstate Commerce Commission has never shown a tendency toward freak rulings. Its time has been taken with genuinely important matters. On these it has raised itself to its present high degree of efficiency. It has shown itself capable of studying the details of complicated transportation problems and rendering decisions of great practical sense. But the scope, and therefore the efficiency, of the Interstate Commerce Commission are closely hemmed in by existing laws. The latest "crisis" between the railroads and the four great brotherhoods of their employees brought this limitation sharply to the fore. It is therefore equally essential that the power and scope of the Federal commission be broadened as well as being made superior to those of the state regulating boards.[21] And it is gratifying to note the progress that President Wilson already is making toward the first of these necessary immediate reliefs to the railroads of the land.