In the classification of the Southern Railway and Steamship Association pearline was placed in the fourth class, with a rate of 73 cents per hundred pounds, and common soap in the sixth class, with a rate of 49 cents per hundred pounds. This latter article, when shipped by large manufacturers, enjoyed besides a special rate of 33 cents per hundredweight. Pearline and soap are competitive; there is no appreciable difference between them as regards the cost of transportation; but one commands a higher price in the market than the other, and upon this fact solely did the railroad company base its alleged right to levy upon pearline a transportation tax 120 per cent. in excess of that levied upon soap, though the service rendered by the company was the same in either case. The commission held that the discrimination made by the "special rate" of the Southern Railway and Steamship Association between pearline and common soap was unjust, and ordered that it be discontinued and that, with common soap in the sixth class, pearline be placed in the fifth. For years the rate from Indianapolis to New York was the same for corn as for its direct products, such as ground corn, cracked corn, corn meal, hominy and corn feed. Such a tariff made it possible for Western mills to compete with similar mills that had been established in the East, since a discrimination of 5 per cent. was sufficient to absorb three or four times the profits of any Western mill. It was shown by the evidence produced that the actual cost of transportation was substantially the same for direct corn products as for the raw corn. The only defense which the railroad company could make for this discrimination was that in the carriage of raw corn they had to meet lake competition. The weakness of this argument will be perceived when it is remembered that Indianapolis is 154 miles from the nearest lake-shipping point. There is but little doubt that this discrimination was made by the railroad company because it was to its interest to haul the raw corn from the West to the East and to return it in altered form. Railroads care, as a rule, little for a waste of force, if such waste is to their own advantage. In another case brought before the commission in 1889 it was shown that the "Official Classification" placed common soap in carload lots in Class V, while such articles as coffee, pickles, salted and smoked fish in boxes or packages, rice, starch in barrels or boxes, sugar, cereal line and cracked wheat are placed in Class VI. The chief reply of the railroad companies to this complaint was that soap was justly placed in Class V because the components from which it is in part made stood in Class V. In another case it was shown that one kind of soap was burdened with a higher transportation tax than another, irrespective even of cost, because one had been advertised as toilet and the other as laundry soap.