It cannot be denied that a colossal sum is paid annually in directors' fees and general managers' salaries.

Here is a list of seventeen companies, giving the number of their directors and the amount of fees paid to them:

In considering this matter, the question arises whether railway directors should be allowed to be railway contractors. That they should be so allowed is open to obvious objections.

But, apart from this, will any sane person doubt that 50 per cent. of these directors are unnecessary, and can it be denied that it should have been the business of the Board of Trade to have moved in the matter? It would probably confuse the reader to take him through the list of highly-paid officials, a large percentage of which, any practical railwayman will agree, are totally unnecessary.

An apparently well-informed writer in the Daily

1 Normally pay no dividend on their ordinary stock.

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Citizen, April 16, 1914, has stated that a railway director is, as far as management goes, not only a superfluity but an expensive luxury." He is more than this, however, he is the man who bars the way to the promotion of the worker, and kills the spirit of emulation throughout the entire railway service.

With every wish to be indulgent, it is difficult to understand, or indeed excuse, the conduct of the body of gentlemen who allow themselves to be called railway directors. The emolument they collectively receive for this concession on their part may be put at some hundreds of thousands of pounds per annum; the exact amount, as usual, is not divulged by the railway companies, but it has been estimated to be about half a million in money, and the privilege of free travel for themselves and their families, and those to whom they may choose to extend patronage. This last is by no means an inconsiderable item of railway expenditure. There should be no reason for excluding all information as to directors' fees, managers' salaries, and the lavish bestowal of free passes, from the Blue Books.

These railway directors, in other respects, conduct themselves as honest and decent citizens, and it is hard to conceive how they, in this instance, can reconcile with common honesty their receipt of this money, for making a false pretence to being what they are not. They must know that the money they are paid is the property of the railway shareholders, and that they have no right to take it unless they have performed the service for which it is paid. This service is to guard jealously the interests committed to their care.

This they have failed to do, and this they have made no attempt to do.

They have uniformly opposed themselves to those interests. It has been easily within their power to insist upon an investigation of the circumstances resulting in the annual disappearance of millions of railway money. They have remained the supine and

contented recipients of the money they have, not only not earned, but which they actually receive as hushmoney. They have closed their eyes and ears to the doings of the greedy group of officials who for years have injured the railway shareholders, their employers, the railway workmen, their servants, and the public, their customers. This injury has been committed with an impunity secured by the negative treachery of the so-called railway director. Unfortunately there can be no doubt as to the facts of the case against these gentlemen. Year after year they have been made aware, by the published accounts, that increase in expenditure has outstripped increase in gross receipts, to the extent of millions of money, not only unaccountably, but with a whole host of reasons why the opposite should have been the case. They have made no protest. They have not only seen these unaccountable figures without making a protest, but they have allowed the shortage to be explained by palpable misstatements. They have heard the statement made in the House of Commons, that there is a yearly shortage in railway accounts of millions of money. They have not attempted to deny this statement. They have allowed it to pass. They have not dared to look into the matter, because they know it to be true. It may indeed be that in some instances the railway director is unconscious of his dereliction of duty, but he knows that he is receiving something for an apparent nothing. He knows that in this workaday world a man is never paid £500 a year for nothing. Á man who hires out his honourable name to an enterprise is morally bound to make sure that he is not being made a cat's-paw. Unless he does so, he becomes equally guilty with the actual delinquent.

Prima facie, the facts are that maladministration of a very serious character has been going on for forty years, and the question arises whether this could have continued had railway directors done their duty.

As has already been shown, a very simple arithmetical calculation from the figures published by the Board of Trade is all that is necessary, and had railway directors exercised any vigilance whatever, they would long ago have discovered and put a stop to the practice which allows unnecessary wagons to be foisted on to railway companies for the profit of the wagon-builder and his

associates.

Whatever explanation there may be of the conduct of railway directors, that explanation is not to hand.

Lord Claud Hamilton postulated in a letter to the Press that, "If railway directors are to be held responsible for railway mismanagement, then we are to blame."

It will come as a shock to the plain business man that there should ever have been the least doubt on the matter.

Is railway administration a fraud on the nation? In ordinary circumstances it would be improper to use so harsh a term towards a whole industry, and an industry, too, conducted under the supervision of a public Department of the British Government; but in the present instance the circumstances are far from ordinary. Not only has railway maladministration robbed the country of money, but, during this war, of thousands and thousands of valuable lives.

It is not the business of this book to usurp the function of H.M. judges, or to condemn any individual without a fair trial, but prima facie it is permissible to point out that either the missing money is to be accounted for by, inter alia, increased price of railway material, or it is not. It has been shown that it cannot be so accounted for; full and detailed reasons and quoted statistics in support of this statement have been made.

The railway fraud is by far the greatest national fraud in the history of the world, and has for years involved a loss of between three and four hundred millions of

pounds per annum at least to the British public, and must, if it be not checked, ultimately involve the nation in wholesale ruin.

The existence of a fraud means that someone is being defrauded. This is so. The railway shareholders have been defrauded for years of the interest on their investments. The railway workmen have been defrauded of the just increase of wages which should have been theirs owing to the decreased purchasing power of the sovereign in the matter of foodstuffs. This increase in the price of food-stuffs has been in a measure due to our incapacity to feed ourselves an incapacity solely due to railway maladministration. The public have also been the sufferers in this direction. The trader has been defrauded of his profits, and the whole community has been deprived of the benefits, moral and material, which the greater prosperity of those three classes of persons would have bestowed.

The ways in which this comes about are various, as would naturally be the case where the expenditure of over £80,000,000 per annum is involved.

A common way, however, is that vast quantities of rolling-stock are ordered and tracts of land acquired which are not needed, and cannot, in the nature of things, be used.

This is proved to the hilt by the undisputed fact that a railway goods wagon has a laden mobility of about one-half per cent. of its time, i.e., less than two days out of the whole year.

The existence of so many unnecessary wagons creates the necessity for the purchase of large tracts of land on which the wagons can stand and rot in the sunlight and the rain. Whosoever profits by this the railway shareholder is the loser.

The action of sunlight and rain in destroying wagons is not as rapid as the parties interested in their