the Board of Trade has power to call for Railway Returns.

By all this corruption the merchant is handicapped in competing with other countries, and enterprise is strangled.

The actual financial loss caused by a bad system can never be measured by the actual amount lost by the administration of that system.

The incompetent Board of Trade official may only receive £1,200 a year, but his action may lose the country, and has lost the country, hundreds of millions of money.

It may be that the Board of Trade is influenced by occult political considerations. There are those who hold nationalisation up their sleeves as a trumpcard at a future election.

No mumpsimus, however, political or otherwise, should be allowed to stand in the way of this most pressing of all reforms. If English commerce is allowed to be smothered in this quagmire, no amount of artificial respiration will restore it.

It is impossible that this subject should any longer be made the football of party politics.

It is the duty of the Board of Trade to overhaul railway administration without delay.

It is the duty of the Board of Trade to insist that a scheme of reform, to deal with the existing state of chaos, be produced by the railways.

If the railway managers profess themselves unable to do this, then it is the duty of the Board of Trade to examine impartially all schemes submitted from outside sources, no matter whence they come. If a better scheme can be found than the Goods Clearing House scheme, let the newcomer have a fair hearing. In the interests of the nation and the Empire, so much must be done without delay.

The Empire is at war. The debauch of folly which

the country has supinely permitted in times of peace it can no longer afford.

Stupidity must be dethroned. It is the arch-enemy. Should Germany be before us in bringing about this reform, she will once again have forestalled us in the matter of big guns, but the problem of equalising matters will be far more difficult, and may be impossible.

Shoot all thine arrows into my dark belly,
And I will quench them. I am Stupidity,
Against whom even the gods contend in vain.

-SCHILLER.

CHAPTER VII

CARTAGE

It is almost unbelievable, but it is nevertheless a fact proved by figures taken from the Blue Book on Railway Returns for 1913, that the dead loss on the cartage operations conducted by the railway companies in the United Kingdom is over £5,000,000 per annum. These operations, however, constitute only a small fraction of the cartage work of the United Kingdom.

It is important to remember that our railways only do a small fraction of the cartage of the country, as high freight rates have been falsely attributed to this service of cartage which the railway companies claim to perform and do not perform.

Cartage done by railway companies is less than 5 per cent. of the whole. This computation is reached by comparing the number of road vehicles owned by the railways with the estimated number owned by the country. The exact number of road vehicles owned by the railway companies is 33,552.

As confirmation of the above and as another way of approaching the matter, let us compare the number of railway vehicles with the number of road vehicles owned by the railway companies. The total number of rail wagons, railway owned and privately owned, is 1,410,746, as against 33,552 railway-owned road vehicles, or 2.4 per cent. of the number of rail vehicles.

The railway wagon, as has been shown, has an average efficiency of less than one ton per day.

The total railway-borne tonnage of the United Kingdom is 372,000,000 tons per annum; 299,000,000 tons of this is minerals which the railways admit they do not touch. This leaves us with 73,000,000 tons of general merchandise, and assuming the railway companies to carry this it would involve each wagon carrying over seven tons a day, or seven times as much as the railway vehicle.

It has, however, been proved up to the hilt that the London road vehicle does not on an average carry more than one ton per day, some more and some less.

The fact is that railway companies cart one-seventh of their general merchandise, or one-seventh of onefifth, or one thirty-fifth, of their total tonnage, and on this they lose £5,000,000 per annum.

Let the railway shareholders be thankful they don't carry more.

Having regard to the long list of misstatements which have been exposed in this book, and which have been put forward by so-called railway experts in their endeavours to bolster up an utterly foolish and hopelessly rotten system, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that long-continued impunity has rendered them reckless.

It is not only the loss of the £5,000,000, which if it stood by itself would be comparatively unimportant, but it is the concealed, involved loss which is the serious matter. A wasteful process must inevitably bar the way to development.

It will be of interest to examine the circumstances which lead to this waste of money.

The actual work done by a railway road vehicle will now be explained.

A carman is sent with a load of goods from Paddington to Smithfield, and he is told that he will be considered an inefficient carman, unless he can secure another load on his return journey, and the result of this is that, having delivered his first load, he spends

some hours in looking for another. This having been at length promised to him, he will wait outside the premises from which the load is to come for two or three hours in order to get it. What applies to Smithfield also applies to Covent Garden and elsewhere. Thus the carmen and their boys put in hours and hours of idling.

One of the worst instances of this dawdling is to be found at Billingsgate Fish Market.

About 800 tons of fish arrive every day at Billingsgate, and of this 400 tons are water-borne and 400 tons are rail- and road-borne; the latter are carted from the various London goods stations by means of about 180 pair-horse railway vans. The bulk of these vans arrive at Billingsgate between three and four o'clock in the morning, and remain waiting in the precincts of the market for an average of over eight hours, when they depart on their return journey to the railway stations whence they came, with loads of empty and very malodorous fish trunks. Owing to the presence of these vans during the long hours of their detention, retailers' carts are unable to come close up to the market place, and this disability involves the necessity of expensive porterage. It may here be said that these porters, who carry the fish trunks on their heads, are paid as much as 3 a week. The disadvantages of such a state of things are quite obvious. The proposal is, that all fish trains, or all railway wagons carrying fish, should proceed to the Clearing House, and thence to the Clearing House wharf, via Snow Hill railway connection, as shown on the map (see Map at beginning of the book), near St. Paul's. It will be seen that the wharf is situated between the railway bridge and the road bridge, at Blackfriars, on the north bank of the river, and it is only a two-minutes' run by rail from the Clearing House.

This wharf will be equipped with suitable electric cranes, the advantage of which is that they can be