THE MILK AND CREAM TRADE. 147 



Milk and Railways. 



That the milk trade is of enormous importance to dairy 

 farmers will on all hands be admitted. It is, as we know it 

 now, almost wholly a development of the last twenty-five years. 

 But for railway facilities it would be an impossible thing. The 

 railway companies, indeed, hold it in the hollow of their hands ; 

 they can develop it to any practicable extent, or they can kill 

 it by neglect, as they please. But it pays them well as it is, 

 and will pay them still better if they treat it in a fair and 

 generous spirit. 



Hitherto most of the companies have shown a disposition to 

 give the milk trade tolerably fair play, if no favour. But as 

 milk is a farm product, and as all products of the farms of these 

 islands have been called upon to pay higher freight rates than 

 foreign products of a like nature, milk has not yet met with the 

 favourable treatment it is entitled to on the part of the railway 

 companies. The milk trade is a constant and regular morning 

 and evening thing, all the year round, and for this if for no 

 other reason it ought to command due consideration from the 

 directors of railways. 



The prosperity of dairy farming in Great Britain depends to 

 a very serious extent on the action of the railway companies in 

 respect of the milk trade ; there is, in fact, not a dairy farmer 

 in the whole of the British Islands who is not directly or 

 indirectly interested in this question. The Board of Trade has 

 some considerable amount of influence over railway rates, and 

 the farmers of this country have every reason to expect that the 

 Board will see that they are not prejudicially hampered by rail- 

 way charges that will starve their business and interfere with 

 their livelihood. For, after all, directors as individuals are but 

 human, and as companies they are supposed to have no con- 

 science. 



The farmers in the district of Bakewell, Derbyshire, which is 

 a milk-producing and milk-selling district, for the most part 

 send their milk to dealers in Manchester, or some other large 

 town in Lancashire or in Yorkshire. They sell at so much per 



