"A stranger to the law might infer, from some public addresses and pamphlets which have assumed to discuss this subject, that the railroad companies were prohibited from carrying the necessities of life over long distances at very low rates, unless their rates on other subjects of transportation for shorter distances were made to correspond. Indeed, instances have been pointed out in which it was said that certain articles of commerce could not now be transported for long distances, because, by reason of this provision, they would not bear the charges that must under compulsion of law be imposed upon them. Among such instances has been mentioned the granite industry of New England, as to which it has been said that valuable manufactories have ceased to be profitable because it has now become impossible for the proprietors to obtain from the railroad companies the nominal rates for the transportation of their products which they formerly enjoyed, since it is now, by the long and short haul clause, made criminal for the companies to give such rates. "A complaint of this nature is not to be met by argument, because it is baseless in point of fact. The instance mentioned may safely be assumed to be chosen rather from regard to the need of an attack upon the law than from any belief in the justice of its application. The prohibition of the fourth section, so far as concerns this article of commerce, or any other that can be named, will have no application whatever until it is made to appear that elsewhere upon the lines of the road conveying it there is property of the same kind, for transportation by the same carriers in the same direction, upon which the carriers are disposed to making greater charges in the aggregate for the shorter hauls. "The wheat of the extreme West, it is also said, can no longer have the nominal rates which were formerly made for transportation to the seaboard, but this assertion is also without point or applicability, unless it is shown that the carriers are not only disposed to give such rates, but propose to make up for the consequent losses to themselves by the imposition of greater charges in the aggregate for the carriage of the like grain when offered for carriage by growers in the States nearer the seaboard. Nominal rates impartially made as between shippers of like articles in the same direction and under like circumstances and conditions are as admissible now as they ever were."