Decisions

The Interstate Commerce Commission last week made two major decisions.

Lake Coal. To the annoyance of coal operators in Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee, the Commission refused to let freight rates be lowered 20 cents per ton by railroads (Chesapeake & Ohio, Norfolk & Western, Louisville & Nashville, Hocking Valley, Virginian) which carry coal from that section to the Great Lakes, for transshipment to the Northwest.

Reasons given:

1) The proposed rate-cut conferred upon coal a special benefit out of scale with the rates given other commodities, notably agricultural. 2) It would tend to precipitate rate-cutting by railroads (Baltimore & Ohio, New York Central, Pennsylvania, Wheeling & Lake Erie) which carry coal to the same market from competing mines in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio. Rate wars are against the public interest, especially Labor's, and are one of the evils the I. C. C. was founded to suppress.

The respondents promptly accused the I. C. C., as it had been accused before, of presuming to equalize prosperity between two competing sections of the country, i.e. to help the West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio coal interests out of the bog into which their labor troubles have thrust them. This the I. C. C. has no power to do, as was sharply suggested by the Senate last month. The barb in the Senate's pending investigation of the I. C. C. (TIME, Feb. 20) is a clause directing the Commissioners to cite statutory authorities for each & every one of their decisions during the past five years wherein "the reasonableness of any rate or rates were in any sense influenced by the competitive advantage" of the producers of one section over another.

Loree Merger. The I. C. C. suddenly ordered Leonor Fresnel Loree to explain why his railroad mergers proceedings in the Southwest were not a violation of the Clayton Anti-Trust law. Mr. Loree had had his Kansas City Southern R. R. buy control of the larger Missouri-Kansas-Texas ("Katy") and the St. Louis Southwestern ("Cotton Belt"), presuming that he was protected by the 1920 Transportation Act of Congress which encouraged the railroads to unify regional systems. Railroad men realized that the I. C. C.'s present gesture towards Mergerer Loree may be an effort to rub away the conflicts between the Clayton Anti-Trust Act and the 1920 Transportation (consolidation) Act.