Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/617

 REVIEWS 595 in my judgment land the country quite unexpectedly in a logical impasse, from which there can be no outlet except by State purchase of the entire railway system.' Mr. Acworth is not at his best in purely theoretical discussion; and I have read the volume without discovering his opinion as to the limits within which interference by. the State in regard to rates is expedient. He writes at one moment as if he deprecated it, at another as if he thought that it was often politic. But he has the facts at his finger ends. He does good service in ex- posing some of the fallacies which have persistently been put forward in the name of the traders, and he makes it clear that the legislation of 1888 was passed with lamentably little knowledge of the difficulties of the problem. The chapters headed ' What the Traffic will Bear ?' ' What the Traffic will not Bear ?' ' Who shall fix the Rates ?' are excellent. We recommend them to the study of those who take their facts and arguments on railway management from Mr. Marshall Stevens and other thoroughgoing advocates of the Traders' claims, and who forget that the interests of the public may not coincide with those of producers and retailers. Elsewhere in the Ecowmic Journal we submit that the temporary settlement of the rates ques$ion, now concluded, is chiefly in the interests of classes no more to be confounded with those of the whole community than are the interests of the railway companies. Mr. Acworth says in effect the same. At p. 88 is a vivid description of the duties of a general manager. Manifestly the formation of rates, as there stated, is, if not an exact science, infinitely more rational than the arbitrary arrangements solemnly sanctioned by Parliament. There is ample room for a complete work on railways in their economic aspects: a work more comprehensive than Professor Hadley's or Dr. Cohn's; a work which would deal more fully with railways than' M. de Foville's well-known volume on modes of transport, and which would not be merely theoretical like M. Launhardt's. From Mr. Acworth's pages the author of such a work might draw much useful instruction, especially in regard to the actual management of English railways for the last few years. The book is not a mere summary of the evidence laid before the Rates Committee in 1881-82 and the Board of Trade inquiry in 1890; it is a distinct contribution to the literature of the subject. Mr. Acworth's testimony a little biasseal, perhaps is distinctly in favour of private management; and he is convinced that ' in the long run State control ends in keeping down the best to the level of the worst, and that, taking them for all in all, the private railway companies of England and the United States have served the public better than the Government railways of the Continent or of our own Australian Colonies, and which is more to the point are likely to serve it better in the future.' Readers of the volume ought not to ignore Appendix B, in which will be found a comparison between English and American rates for nilk, drapery, fruit, fish, potatoes, &c. It is very difficult to know the value of such comparisons without being QQ2