Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/573

 NOTES AND MEMORAN'DA -[o the dispute; and the Committee think that, as so many disputes originate merely in ignorance and mutual misunderstanding and unfounded suspicions and alarms, the mediation of a board constituted in the way proposed and clothed with the dignity of a State institution, would be generally successful without any need of recourse to arbitra- tion. The Governor's speech at the opening of last Parliament announced a Government Bill for 'the constitution of courts of conciliation, and of tribunals to conduct and determine cae6 of arbitration in final resort, and to make other provision for th settlement of trade disputes.' THE Colony of ictoria some years ago placed the state railways under the control of a board of separate Commissioners entirely independent of the Government. This plan was adopted for the purpose of excluding all possibility of illegitimate political influence from the management of that branch of the public service, and it has been borrowed from Victoria by most of the other Australasian colonies, and been thought by Sir Charles Dilke and other writers to furnish the true solution of the problem of state management. But experience in ictoria has shown it to work ill, and the Government of the colony has now announced its intention of introducing a bill in the present session of Parliament for amending the Railways Management Act, by which it was originally legalised. The great fault of the system is that, in freeing the railways from the control of the Government, it freed them at the same time from all possibility of control by the public, and the usual effects of irresponsibility in a great spending department of state soon appeared again, and in a much more aggravated form, because the irresponsibility was so much more complete. Under the old system there always existed some sort of check in the fact that a question could be asked in Parliament about.anything that seemed wrong, anal a minister or even a ministry might be dismissed in consequence; but when a job was suspected under the new system, no information what- ever could be obtained, for the Commissioners refused on principle to answer any questions put by the Government, and private person6 had no means of bringing them to book. Complaints are accordingly rife of the great and growing extravagance of their management, of their indifference to the public convenience, and even of the increase of the wry evil the system was devised to check;for though illegitimate political influence may have been stopped, illegitimate private influence is said to have become more rampant than ever. Trains of a dozen carriages are stated to be run regularly to accommodate a single traveller, and rural land to have been bought for railway construction at 44 an acre, when 2 an acre was the ordinary market price for it. How far any of these particular charges may be correct we have neither means nor interest to say, but it is at any rate certain that the ictorian Railway