with a fair proportion of Indian
members on it, which with a man like Sir William Acworth as Chairman
will, it may be hoped, not be content merely to pass judgment upon it,
but will be able also to point to a better way in the future. The
evidence produced before the Committee furnishes ample material for a
scathing indictment of the system.

There are altogether only some 35,000 miles of railroad in India to-day,
or about as much as before the war in European Russia, the most backward
of all European countries, whose population was little more than a third
of that of India. The Government of India may claim that this is a
magnificent return for the L380,000,000 of capital expenditure that
these railways represent to-day in its books, and that the profits which
they have yielded for the last twenty years with steadily increasing
abundance to the State show the money to have been well invested. But
how if these results have been achieved only by a short-sighted and
narrow-minded policy which sacrificed the future to the present?

Of the Indian railways some are owned and worked by the State, some are
owned by the State and worked by companies, some are owned and worked by
companies under contracts with the State. The companies that own and
work their own lines are for the most part domiciled in England, and the
evidence already taken before the Committee shows how little power is
left by the London Boards to the local agents who manage them, and how
often the interests of the public and of the country appear to be
subordinated to the narrow view taken at home of the companies' own
interests. But however flagrant the special shortcomings of the
company-owned railways may be, the root of the evil common to all lies
in the policy laid down by and for the Government of India, in whom the
supreme control has always been vested as a professedly necessary
consequence of the financial guarantees given by the State and the right
of ultimate purchase reserved to it. That control, which has passed
through many different incarnations in the course of the last
half-century, has been exercised since 1905 by a Railway Board of three
members outside of, but subordinate to, the Government of India. It is
represented in the Viceroy's Executive Council by the Member for
Commerce and Industry, but its real master and the ultimate authority in
all matters of railway policy is and always has been the Finance Member
of the Government of Indi