anagement when it was too late.

It is hardly necessary to add that another result of such an operation
would be to prevent the Irish Government raising the very large sum
necessary for improving and standardising the light railways and for
extensions, except at an unremunerative rate of interest. Even if
shareholders be put off with State paper, contractors will have to be
paid with cash. Moreover the creation of such a large amount of debt at
the beginning of the new regime would render it difficult, if not
impossible, for the Irish Government to raise sums necessary for other
public works and services of a pressing character, arterial drainage,
canals, education, and other objects, not to speak of migration,
congestion, and land purchase. The conclusion, in fact, is inevitable,
that without the security of the United Kingdom, and the market of
British investors willing to lend, it is idle to think that either State
purchase of railways, or any other of the boons mentioned, are
reasonably possible. Mr. Erskine Childers, though a Home Ruler, does not
fail to perceive, to use his own words, "that financial independence
will now mean a financial sacrifice to Ireland."[100]

EFFECT OF NATIONALISATION ON TRADE RELATIONS.

There are other important considerations which confirm the view that, if
the control of Irish railways were taken away from the Imperial
Parliament, and placed under a Parliament sitting in Dublin, and if the
general code of railway legislation now binding on both countries could
be altered by a Home Rule legislature, results disastrous to the trade
between the two countries would probably follow, whether
"Nationalisation" were carried out or not.

The Majority Report recommends, as one of the chief objects of
"Nationalisation" under an Irish authority, the reduction of _export_
rates, both local and through rates, on the Irish railways, as
"essential to the development of Irish industry," and this seems the pet
project of a large number of witnesses, and of Irish local authorities.
Import and export railway rates are now the same for the same classes of
produce, and no Irish railway company could now differentiate between
them, without being pulled up by the Railway Commission at the suit of
British traders, or British railway companies. The policy suggested is
practically to use railway rates as a system of local protection,
similar to the existing practice and policy on the continental, and
notab