360 SECTIONAL TRANSACTIONS.— F. 



would warrant the construction of the line, or would have indicated the correct route 

 to follow. In this sense there can be no doubt that South Africa has reached the 

 peak of its railway expansion. The problem is now one of organising a national 

 highway system, and co-ordinating it with the State railway system already in exist- 

 ence. This paper considers the existing obstacles, political, legal and financial, to 

 this, and the ways in which they could be removed. It emphasises the need for a 

 central authority to deal with these and alhed matters, to consolidate the regulations 

 affecting transport throughout the Union, to unify provincial ordinances and Union 

 Statutes with reference to the taxation of road users, and to establish a road fund 

 into which monies so raised should be paid. 



Just as the haphazard construction and maintenance of roads and the building 

 of uneconomic railway lines can no longer be permitted, so the unregulated and 

 frequently haphazard fixing of railway transport charges, which the paper shows has 

 taken place in the past, must in the interests of the Union be prevented in future. 

 Consideration of the problems of the relation of the State railways to organised and 

 unorganised motor transport undertakings, of the present legal powers and obligations 

 of each, and of the present and prospective competition between them, leads to the 

 conclusion that they cannot be solved by mere ' rule of thumb ' legislative efforts. 

 They can no more be solved by restrictive legislation preventing road motor develop- 

 ment and competition than by merely leaving road motor transport unregulated. 

 There is the most urgent need, therefore, for a national body, such as a Ministry of 

 Transport, to co-ordinate and control all the transport services of the Union. There 

 is need also for an impartial national body to act as a board of appeal, and to 

 adjudicate upon, and where necessary fix, the charges of the various organised trans- 

 port undertakings, so as to safeguard both the public and the transport undertakings 

 themselves, against unfair practices and competition. The paper outlines how these 

 national bodies could in the interests of the Union best be constituted and appointed, 

 what their functions should be and what problems they will have to deal with. 



Thursday, August 1. 



Mr. John Martin. — Group Control in the Gold Mining Industry. 



Mr. W. H. Clegg. — Banking in South Africa. 



Friday, August 2. 



Presidential Address by Prof. H. Clay on The Public Regulation of 

 Wages in Great Britain. (See p. 119.) 



Mr. W. H. HuTT. — Collective Bargaining and Distribution. 



The object of this paper is to controvert the suggestions (a) that there is some 

 portion of the normal remuneration of labour which, in the absence of collective 

 bargaining by labour, is, or can be. transferred to the remuneration of other factors of 

 production owing to labour's ' disadvantage in bargaining ' ; or (6) that combina- 

 tion, by increasing labour's ' bargaining power,' enables it to acquire a part of the 

 normal remuneration of some other factor. 



BeKef in the Wages Fund formula did not prevent the classical economists from 

 having a vague beUef also in the ' disadvantage ' of uncombined labour. The 

 attac): on the Wages Fund by trade union apologists in the late sixties was merely 

 incidental to their attempts to rationahse these vague ideas about labour's dis- 

 advantage. In those attempts they had recourse to exceptional and unlikely examples 

 which showed that they were groping confusedly towards a notion of the indeterminate- 

 ness that may arise in isolated individual transactions or under what has since been 

 called ' bilateral monopoly.' But competition on both sides was generally blamed 

 for the workers' disadvantageous bargain. The indefiniteness of isolated bargains had 

 been realised earher but dismissed as unimportant. From 1867 the development of 

 the idea of indeterminateness can be traced through one Jacob Waley, Thornton, 

 Fleeming Jenkin, Edgeworth, Sidgwick, Bohm-Bawerk and Marshall to modern 

 writers. Those mathematical economists who have treated the conception most care- 

 fully would probably agree that it is of little practical importance as regards distribution 

 in general ; for such indeterminateness will not apply merely to the wage bargain ; and 



