The scalping practice made this manner of reporting receipts inevitable. For example, a big block of tickets was sold outright to a scalper--it might be at fifty, sixty or seventy per cent. of the rate charged at the railway’s own counter. He paid for them. When they came back to head office there was nothing to differentiate the tickets sold to the scalpers and the tickets sold to the public. The conductor couldn’t tell when he lifted a ticket that had been bought from a scalper. He had to turn it in as part of his report. Say there were a thousand tickets from Montreal to Chicago, and the regular rate was thirty dollars, a total of thirty thousand dollars. But the railway’s cash receipts were only twenty thousand dollars, because of the scalping. The proportion of scalped revenue, obviously, would vary from month to month. Adjustment was necessary; and in making adjustments it is equally obvious that it would be a convenience to even up from a reserve in hand, or to put part of an exceptionally good run of receipts into the reserve. For the benefit of the juvenile generation it may be added that scalping became so large and pervasive an adjunct to transportation that its interests developed an organization of their own. If you wanted a through ticket to San Francisco, instead of taking chances of making a good bargain at a scalper’s, between trains at Chicago, the scalper in Toronto would do all the needful business for you. He regarded himself as a broker, and to some he was a very present help in time of trouble. That he was not necessary--assuming proper relations between the railways and the public--is proved by his elimination as soon as public control of railways arrived. The anomaly of the fast freight line was another and more wonderful manifestation of the vicious principle which was behind the scalping. It also had its relation to two other transportation services which still exist, though they are not as liable to the same abuses that were inseparable from the fast freight lines--I mean the express service and the Pullman car. The express business to California was being done by ponies, for instance, before there was railway communication across the mountains. When railways were built the express companies brought their business to them, using cars, and paying the railways a percentage of receipts for the entire service.