Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/514

492. The problem which Parliament imposed upon the Board of Trade and the Duke of Richmond's Committee, is, in truth, incapable of exact solution. It is difficult, as every inquiry before the Railway Commissioners with respect to undue preference shows, to calculate the present, to say nothing of the future, cost of the conveyance of traffic. Human foresight cannot foretell twelve months ahead, far less for all time, what will be a fair remunerative charge for conveyance of merchandise in all the changing conditions off railway traffic. All the elements of cost fluctuate —some of them, such as the price of coal and wages, do so in a remarkable degree from year to year.

Nor would the average cost—that is, the cost at which no one article is, in fact, carried—throw light on the question what is the fair remunerative charge for carrying, say, sulphur from Liverpool to Manchester, wire, crude or manufactured, from Sheffield to Hull, castings from the Midland towns to London. The elements of cost are changing from month to month; whether the wagons go the return journey full or empty makes a material difference. In the inquiry at Westminster there was much discussion whether, as suggested by the Company, £1 16s. 8d. a ton, or, as suggested by the traders, £1 was a fair maximum for sugar; whether silk waste should be put in Class 3 or Class 5, whether plush, made of a silk waste surface and a cotton weft or back, should be treated as cotton or silk; whether undamageable iron goods should be in Class A or B. For many days Lord Balfour and Mr. Courtenay Boyle sat inquiring into the conditions of hundreds of articles; considering, for example, whether basic material should be included in Class A, whether lime or burnt limestone should be classed in the same class—in other words, what rates such articles would bear. Who can decide such questions? Who can tell, or rather foretell, the fair maximum or proper margin, for such articles? No one was charlatan enough to say that more than a rough guess was possible. Never, even in the days when the prices of bread and ale were fixed by law, was an attempt made such as that undertaken under the Railway and Canal Traffic Act—the attempt to fix the maximum charges for the transport of all varieties of merchandise from minerals to mouse-traps. The assize of ale, as regulated by