RAILWAY EXTENSION IN AUSTRALIA. 981 
It is these credits, and not the estimated receipts from goods 
and passenger rates which should be used as criteria of prosperity ; 
the rates charged ‘have nothing whatever to do with the subject, 
and are really, inter alia, merely a machinery for dividing the 
expenditure equitably between the actual immediate users and 
the whole people. So that when the time arrives that the 
Australian Colonies are so intersected by a net-work of lines so 
that every inhabitant is equally served, free railways would be 
financially justifiable, and the working expenses and _ interest 
might be charged wholly to the general taxation revenue. 
Mr. W. M. Acworth, who is one of the greatest living 
authorities on railway matters, adverts to the possibility of such 
an arrangement, when the Government owns the lines, in a valu- 
able paper on “ The State in relation to Railways.” 
We may illustrate this by the parallel instance of the public 
roads and road bridges. These are made and maintained in 
Australia by the Government, or other public bodies, but there is 
no direct revenue therefrom, from the actual users, which of 
course might be obtained by the establishment of turnpikes ; 
hence if the same method of estimating whether they were paying 
public works or not were used, as is usually done in the case of 
the other means of communication—railways, there would be 
nothing on the credit side, and the whole interest on the outlay 
and the cost of the maintenance should be put down as a dead 
loss to the country, which, of course, it is very well known, they 
are not. 
Tf it be said that the credit due to saving in transport goes 
chiefly to the locality immediately served, while the debits are 
paid by the whole community, it may be answered that this is 
only partly and temporarily the case. The cost of local pro- 
duction exported is cheapened by the saving in transport, 
while the imports balancing them hold the same value as 
before ; hence the local producers would appear to be, at the 
first glance, those only who benefit. But in the first place, the 
locality pays so much of the expenses as is represented by 
the rates and fares, and secondly, the cheapening gradually 
affects the whole market, for the enrichment of the locality leads 
to its extra trade with outside, and it diffuses itself in different 
directions. Again, even if local advantage were to some extent 
derived at the general expense, the whole contention of this paper 
presupposes an ultimate, and as far as practicable, fair distribution 
of expenditure by the Government on communications, whether 
by railways, rivers, harbours or roads, throughout the State, 
according to its needs. 
This more enlarged view of the benefit of improved communi- 
cation is not, of course, new to economists, but it seems to be 
necessary to bring it more distinctly before the general public 
