DISTRIBUTION OF HOME PRODUCE 209 



With such widespread distribution from the actual 

 producing centre as that which is here indicated, we 

 get evidence of conditions very different from those 

 under which, say, trainloads of foreign produce are 

 made up for one great distributing centre in England 

 or Scotland ; and what is done at Kirton is going 

 on also in Cornwall, at Evesham, at Wisbech, and 

 many other places. But, the higher scale of payment 

 on small, or comparatively small, lots to the consuming 

 centre direct, as compared with the smaller rates avail- 

 able for big combined loads to what would be merely a 

 point for intermediary distribution, is probably made 

 up for by the better returns the producers or traders 

 should secure under the system they have found it to 

 their advantage to adopt. 



While, therefore, on the one hand, this difference 

 in conditions is not always borne in mind, I would 

 venture to say, even by railway managers in their 

 criticisms of the British farmer and his ways, on the 

 other hand the farmer himself has obviously no reason 

 for complaint if, operating on wholly different lines, he 

 is charged retail rates on a practically retail business, 

 while the foreigner gets wholesale rates on what, until 

 the main distributing centre here is reached, is essentially 

 a wholesale business.* 



Then, the bacon that Denmark sends to London via 

 Parkeston at the rate of 50,000 tons a year ; the foreign 

 butter that goes from Leith Docks to Glasgow in 5o-ton 



* Replying to certain complaints made before the Departmental 

 Committee on alleged preferential railway rates, as to the difference 

 in the rates for English and foreign grain respectively, Sir George 

 Gibb, then General Manager of the North-Eastern Railway Com- 

 pany, said in his evidence on July 5, 1905, that while in 1904 the 

 company carried 269,222 tons of foreign grain from two points 

 the ports of Hull and Newcastle the 265.893 tons of English grain 

 which they carried in the same year were collected by them at no 

 fewer than 467 separate points on the system. 



14 



