Judging by the ultimate quantities of traffic carried, there is only one opinion possible concerning the issue of this memorable struggle. The railroads have won all along the line. The total tonnage carried on the railroads of the United States in 1880 was 290,897,000 tons; the canals in the same year carried only 21,044,000 tons. The income of the railroads in 1880 was 580½ million dollars; that of the canals was only 4½ million dollars. The canals had only one-fourteenth part of the traffic of the railroads, and scarcely more than 1/130 of the gross income. These results are very remarkable when the records of the charges made under each of the two systems are examined. When the controversy between them was raging most fiercely, the railroads were charging about three cents per ton per mile, while the canals only charged ·799 of a cent.[114] It was not, therefore, on the ground of greater cheapness that the railroads claimed or received the traffic. It was the same with through as with local traffic. During the six years ending 1884, the receipts of grain and flour at New York by lake, canal, and Hudson River fell from 64 to 45 million bushels. In the same interval the quantity carried by rail only declined from 85¼ to 83 million bushels.[115] Between 1868 and 1884 the total traffic carried on the New York State canals fell from about 6½ million to little more than 5½ million tons. On the competing railroads—the New York Central, the New York, Lake Erie, and Western, and the Pennsylvania Railroad division—it increased from 10,476,000 tons to 36,700,000 tons. On the canals the traffic had decreased by over 15 per cent.; on the railways it had increased by over 350 per cent. The comparison is, of course, not strictly relevant and parallel, inasmuch as in the case of the railways traffic was gathered and carried over a very much wider area, and it was really only over a comparatively limited section of their several routes that competition existed. But the figures all the same serve to show “how the cat was jumping.”