f Ormskirk, it may be expected that the Liverpool District
Farmers' Club will be on the watch for tangible evidence of
their grievances against the railway companies.... Under
certain circumstances competition operates to the advantage
of the public, and rival carriers are constrained to convey
goods from place to place at moderate charges; but where a
company is not held in check, the tendency is for rates to
advance. In many cases, too, special interests of the
companies are promoted at the expense of localities, and
even individuals are subjected to the wrong of preferential
charges. (There are no complaints in Britain that these
discriminations are practised for the purpose of enriching
the officials.) Hence the necessity for the Railway
Commission to regulate the magnates of the iron road, who
when left without restraint pay little regard to interests
other than those of their shareholders.

Although Mr. Acworth fails to mention this phase of English railway
administration, it would appear that the evils of discrimination are
common under corporate management in Great Britain, and that they are
inherent to and inseparable from such management; and that the
questions of rates, discriminations, and free traffic in fuel can be
satisfactorily adjusted only by national ownership, and if for no
other reasons such ownership is greatly to be desired.

The failure to furnish equipment to do the business of the tributary
country promptly is one of the greater evils of corporate
administration, enabling officials to practise most injurious and
oppressive forms of discrimination, and is one that neither federal
nor State commission pays much attention to. With national ownership a
sufficiency of cars would be provided. On many roads the funds that
should have been devoted to furnishing the needed equipment, and which
the corporations contracted to provide when they accepted their
charters, have been divided as construction profits or, as in the case
of the Santa Fe, Union Pacific, and many others, diverted to the
payment of unearned dividends, while the public suffers from this
failure to comply with charter obligations; yet Mr. Dillon informs us
that the citizen commits an impertinence when he inquires why contract
obligations, which are the express consideration for the exceptional
powers granted, are not performed.

Another great advantage which