Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/515

Rh the Statute of Henry III., was a much less ambitious project than that conceived by the Parliament of Victoria. The Court had not the temerity to fix the price of a large number of commodities; it established a sliding scale; 'where a quarter of barley is sold for two shillings, then four quarts of ale should be sold for a penny, &c.' The order of a manor court that the best ale should be sold at threepence a gallon within a particular district, seems to me more rational than the proposal that 'basic slag, ground, packed, blooms, billets, or ingots, bog ore for gas purifying; bricks, clay, common and finer; bricks crushed,' and so on for a hundred articles, shall be carried at one price, and scrap iron, millstones, pig lead, at another. I go further; the inquiry in regard to maximum rates seems to me a mistake, a piece of superstition, a search after that which is not only unattainable, but almost useless even if it could be attained. The trader is concerned with actual rates. From their very nature maximum rates must be at any given time too high or too low. Fixed with an eye to the contingency of increased prices of coal and labour, they are too high; fixed without reference to these elements, they may be unfair to shareholders. The presumption is that a large margin to provide for unknown contingencies will be given. What is the expected advantage? The consignor of goods does not know what he will be asked to pay; he does not know what he ought to pay; there is the uncertain element of terminal charges, and, perhaps, of special services; and the actual rate, though well under the maximum, may be illegal as being an undue preference or unreasonable.

'What is the real object of maxima? I submit to your lordship that the real object of maxima is the simplest possible. It is to secure to those persons who have not the advantage of competition something .... which competition gives to others. If you had complete competition there would be no need of maxima at all.'

Of the justice of this proposal, under which the companies might get no profit, nothing need be said; it is enough to point out that the maximum rates will not be at any moment the same as the competitive rate. To contend, as some of the witnesses called by the railways did in the recent inquiry, that the effect of maximum rates is in all circumstances absolutely nil is an exaggeration. In districts in which no competition exists, a company may choose to earn its revenue by carrying a small