When the decision was written by Commissioner Joseph B. Eastman of the Interstate Commerce Commission in the Southern Class Rate Investigation in 1925, a freight-rate structure was crystallized in the South that had been developing over several decades-decades in which raw material production was predominant in the southern economy. As most of the traffic produced in the South consisted of raw materials and semifinished products, favorable rates on these commodities moved a large part of the traffic. The South in the 1920's, as now, had a relatively small proportion of the nation's total manufacturing, the states in Southern Territory producing at that time about 7 per cent of the total national value of manufactures. Relatively the picture has not changed appreciably, because at the present time the value of manufactures in Southern Territory is only about 8 per cent of the national total. The railroad freight traffic of the South being what it was, naturally the traffic burden was distributed to favor the existing movements of heavy-loading commodities and to exact comparatively high rates from finished products, the production of which was relatively small. Apparently the Commission intended to perpetuate the characteristics of the existing rate structure, because the statement was made that every reasonable effort should be made to simplify the existing rate structure; revision upward or downward of any large group of rates was apparently not contemplated. The simplification consisted mainly of removing the basing point system of rate making and the elimination of many of the outer class and commodity rates. The freight-rate structure of the South exists today in the same basic pattern in which it was set by the Commission's decision in 1925. Rates on such traffic as coal, ores, forest products, cotton, pig iron, and phosphate rock are generally low when compared with the class-rate level. The higher the degree to which goods are processed, however, the higher is the freight-rate level in comparison with that applicable within the Eastern, or Official Territory, the freight-rate territory with the lowest level of freight rates on finished products in the United States.