have happened if the London County Council had
owned Charing Cross Station three years ago. But manifestly there is
nothing better to be done under private ownership conditions. The
common shareholders are scattered and practically powerless, and their
collective aim is, at any expense to the public welfare, to keep the
price of the shares from going still lower.

The South-Eastern Railway is only one striking instance of the general
unserviceableness of private ownership for public services. Nearly all
the British railway companies, in greater or less degree, present now
a similar degenerative process. Years of profit-sweating, of high
dividends, have left them with old stations, old rolling stock, old
staffs, bad habits and diminishing borrowing power. Only a few of
these corporations make any attempt to keep pace with invention. It is
remarkable now in an epoch of almost universal progress how stagnant
the British privately owned railways are. One travels now-a-days if
anything with a decrease of comfort from the 1880 accommodation,
because of the greater overcrowding; and there has been no general
increase of speed, no increase in smooth running, no increase in
immunity from accident now for quite a number of years. One travels in
a dingy box of a compartment that is too ill-lit at night for reading
and full of invincible draughts. In winter the only warmth is too
often an insufficient footwarmer of battered tin, for which the
passengers fight fiercely with their feet. An observant person cannot
fail to be struck--especially if he is returning from travel upon the
State railways of Switzerland or Germany--by the shabby-looking
porters on so many of our lines--they represent the standard of good
clothing for the year 1848 or thereabouts--and by the bleak misery of
many of the stations, the universal dirt that electricity might even
now abolish. You dare not drop a parcel on any British railway cushion
for fear of the cloud of horrible dust you would raise; you have to
put it down softly. Consider, too, the congested infrequent suburban
trains that ply round any large centre of population, the inefficient
goods and parcel distribution that hangs up the trade of the local
shopman everywhere. Not only in the arrested standard of comfort, but
in the efficiency of working also are our privately owned railways a
hopeless discredit to private ownership.

None of them, hampered by their present equipment, are able to adapt