Railway Rates and Charges 343 



a railway company had already been required to give public 

 notice of any increase in tolls, rates or charges it proposed to 

 make), " it shall lie on the railway company to prove that the 

 increase is reasonable " ; and for this purpose it is not to be 

 " sufficient to show that the charge is within any limit fixed 

 by an Act of Parliament or by any Provisional Order con- 

 firmed by Act of Parliament." Complaint is first to be made 

 to the Board of Trade, and, if agreement between the trader 

 and the railway company should not follow thereon, the 

 trader has the right of appeal to the Railway Commissioners, 

 to whom jurisdiction to hear and determine such complaint is 

 given. " So that," as Butterworth remarks in his " Maximum 

 Railway Rates," " the legislation of 1888-1894 presents this 

 remarkable result that Parliament in 1892, after probably 

 the most protracted inquiry ever held in connection with 

 proposed legislation, decided that certain amounts were to 

 be the charges which railway companies should for the future 

 be entitled to make, and in 1894 apparently accepted the 

 suggestion that many of the charges, sanctioned after so much 

 deliberation, were unreasonable, and enacted that to entitle 

 a company to demand them it should not be sufficient to 

 show " that the charge was within the limit which Parliament 

 itself had previously fixed. 



Whether traders have really gained any balance of advan- 

 tage from this further outcome of legislative policy in the 

 assumed protection of their interests, as against the railway 

 companies, is open to question. On the one hand they have 

 a guarantee against increases that offer even the slightest 

 suggestion of unreasonableness. On the other hand the Act 

 has destroyed the element of elasticity in rate-making, in- 

 asmuch as railway managers must needs show extreme caution 

 in granting reduced or " experimental " rates in the interests 

 of growing industries when, if the experiment should fail, 

 and the expected traffic not be forthcoming, the company 

 must go through the formality of advertising the " increase " 

 involved in putting the rate back to its former level, and must, 

 also, run the risk of having to " justify " such increase before 

 the Board of Trade or the Railway and Canal Commission. 

 " I know of my own knowledge and my own experience," 

 Sir George Gibb once told a Departmental Committee of the 

 Board of Trade, " that the effect of these sections has been to 



