Light Railways. 
C65 
secured. On the other hand, by blocking our streets and 
frightening our horses, they will cause us inconvenience of a 
kind to which we have hitherto in this country been strangers. 
Even so you say that it will only just be possible, under the 
most favourable circumstances, to make them return some 4 per 
cent, on the capital involved in them. And to do this they 
will need to charge rates and fares certainly not lower — very 
possibly higher — than those on the existing railways, which we 
regard as too high already. If this is all your light railways 
can do for us, is it clear that we should not be better without 
them altogether? After all, under no circumstances can you 
run a railway into every farmyard. The farmer, therefore, will 
still need to cart his produce to the station, and, if he has got 
to cart it at all, does it matter much whether he carts one mile 
or five ? Assuming that the five miles of cartage costs 4s. a ton, 
and admitting that the five miles by train will only cost Is., to 
that we must add another shilling for taking the stuff to the 
station. There is, therefore, at the outside an economy of only 
2s. per ton, and this is not, as it might be thought to be, 
a saving of 50 per cent., for when the produce reaches the 
junction between the light line and the existing railway it 
requires, as before, to be sent on by train to the great market 
centre. Suppose the railway rate for this service to be 10s. ; the 
comparison is then really between an old charge of 14s. and a 
new charge of 12s., a reduction, not of 50, but only of about 
14 per cent. Is it reasonable to suppose that such a change as 
this can produce any serious effect on agricultural depression in 
this country ? ” 
The objection is a serious and a perfectly fair one. Unfor- 
tunately the answer to it, though it really exists, written large 
by experience all over the face of Continental countries, can 
hardly be precisely set down in figures and percentages. Briefly 
the answer is, that the effect of these new lines is quite as much, 
if not more, moral than material ; that man — and especially 
agricultural man — is rather an imitative and emotional than 
a reasoning animal. It is quite possible that it would have 
paid the farmer in a country village five miles from a train to 
collect his eggs every morning, and sell them as fresh at 2s. 
a dozen in London next day. But it never occurred to him to 
do so, and, in fact, he has gone on collecting them once a week, 
and selling them for 10 d. or Is. The opening of a new station 
half a mile off, with a printed time-table, showing plainly that 
the eggs which leave his station in the afternoon will be 
delivered in London that evening, comes as a fresh breeze into 
the stagnant air of village life, and braces his energy to face 
