THE PURCHASE OF THE IRISH RAILWAYS.
THE debate of Tuesday on Mr. Blennerhassett's proposal that the State should buy up the Irish Railways seems to us 'exceedingly unsatisfactory. Mr. Blennerhassett himself made a fair speech in favour of his project, and Mr. Goldsmid a very able one against it ; but both they, and all other speakers except Mr. McCarthy and Lord Hartington, wandered grievously from the point. That point is not whether' the State should buy up the Railways of the Three Kingdoms, as Mr. Goldsmid persiated in asserting, nor even whether Irish Railways are peculiarly useless to the people, as Mr. McCarthy affirmed, but whether the British Government should or should not ascertain by a great experiment whether the State can or cannot manage Railways better than private speculators and their agents. A very large number of experienced persons, among whom Mr. Gladstone has always been counted, but at the head of whom we may place the late Mr. Graves, of Liverpool, maintain that they can ; that the State, which, a priori, ought to be sole master of its own military communications, might by absorb- ing the Railways improve their management, their carrying power, and their finances, until their usefulness to the people would be quadrupled, their working expenses diminished one-
third, and their revenues so increased that the profit would enable financiers to see their way to a material reduction of the National Debt. Those who believe this as a rule are unwilling to venture on so vast a scheme without a previous experiment, which can be tried successfully only in two places. The system to be
purchased must be isolated, and must be to some extent a failure, and the only two divisions of the Railway net-work which answer those conditions are those of the Eastern Coun- ties and of Ireland, and of the two, the Irish seems to be the more attractive. The isolation there is absolute ; the share- holders are willing to sell, and the total price is moderate, £22,000,000, or double the cost of the Abyssinian Expedition. We quote that sum first, because it is the one given by the advocates of the purchase, but we must add that there is not the slightest reason for giving so much at once. All that Government need buy up is the shares which confer votes and the preference shares, leaving the obligations to be paid off by degrees. We should, however, greatly prefer to see the experiment complete and the State totally unfettered, and can see no reason whatever for apprehending the dangers so many speakers believed to be attendant on the plan. These were just three in number, leaving out Mr.• O'Gorman's dread of an immigration of Englishmen, which was either a joke or a piece of simple nonsense ; and they are,—that the purchase of English Railways would inevitably follow, that Government would lose money, and that the new patronage would be a most demoralising agency. Of these, the first two, both of which were urged by Mr. Gold- amid, are mutually destructive. If the result of State manage- ment in Ireland is a loss, then certainly the experiment will not be repeated in Great Britain. If, on the contrary, it is a gain—a great gain, a gain sufficient to raise an outcry in Eng- land—then tte extension of the experiment can involve no huge financial danger. As a matter of fact, an experiment which succeeds in Ireland is not necessarily repeated here, as witness her Land Registry ; and certainly an experiment in Ireland which had cost money would not create an excitement in its favour in Great Britain, but would be quoted for ever as a warning against all sanguine schemes of entrusting locomo- tion to the State. We believe the scheme would prove a success, the State, and the State only, being either able or willing to apply the great principle that three sixpences are worth more than one shilling.
At present, the state of affairs in Ireland is this. Forty- three separate Companies manage their affairs so badly that they raise only £2,400,000 a year, and spend 53 per cent. of that in working expenses. Mere amalgamation, the dismissal of useless triplicate officials—who would not be entitled, as the Pall Mall Gazette supposes, to any compensation at all, but only to the notice their own shareholders would give them, and indeed, ought to be dismissed before the transaction is completed—would reduce the expenses to 50 per cent., thus leaving £1,200,000, or 5 per cent. on £24,000,000, the sum which, after allowing for purchase, and improvements to the extent of two millions, the Government would have paid. That of itself is a clear profit of 1 per cent, at least, and it would be made before the mass of the traffic had been tapped at all. Speaking broadly, the Irish Railway Directors have steadily adhered to the plan of obtaining dividends by exacting a maximum of pay for a minimum of work. They have never attempted to induce the real people of the country to travel at all. Everything has been done for an upper class which is, out of the great cities, excessively thin, and a middle class which is exceedingly stationary, and nothing for the millions who are said by people who do not know Ireland to be too many, and who want the ability to move short distances cheaply very much indeed. It would be most profitable to carry them, but it would also be most troublesome and so they are taxed till they must walk. In Belgium, says AT.;.. McCarthy, the average third-class fare for 100 miles is 3s. 4d,—and Belgian Railways return 7 per cent. ; in Italy, 4s. ; in Prussia 6s. 6d.; and in Ireland, 8s. 4d. In other words, a third-class passenger in Ireland, who can afford about a third of his English rival, is charged the same,—is in fact, charged as much as a ton of coals, which outweighs him by twelvefold, outspaces him by sixfold, and cannot do its own porterage, while he can. The Belgian rate is not the lowest in the world, the Indian one, on a railway costing £20,000 a mile, being only 2s. 6d. the 100 miles; but he Belgian one, if steadily maintained in Ireland for five years, would, we believe, double the total revenue, with no heavy addition for haulage, the trains being only sent on full instead of empty, and the swift trains specially taxed. The grand difficulty of a third-class traffic—the want of station
accommodation—should be met by the simple expedient of not giving any, &plan successfully adopted in America, and not likely to be a hardship in a country where the people, enjoying the moistest climate in the world, deliberately put two knife- boards on wheels and travel about on them. It is the same with goods, which are taxed till, as Mr. McCarthy says, cattle are driven along the roads, their owners preferring the loss of time and flesh to the loss of money, and many kinds of pro- duce cost 50 per cent, of their value in transit. It is idle to say that all this could be remedied by the Companies themselves, that they could amalgamate if they chose, and reduce fares if they pleased, and generally set up a skilled dictatorship if they desired it. They will not do it. The forty-three sets of Directors, Managers, Jobbers, and Contractors who now mis- manage Irish Railways will not strive heartily to cut their own throats for the benefit of a Central Board, and their shareholders are not enlightened or powerful enough to make them, not to mention the difficulty of extracting forty-three Acts of Parlia- ment out of Members four-fifths of whom never expect to be in Ireland in their lives, or at all events never feel the effects of high Irish rates upon business and locomotion. There is no country in the world except France where the individual, unless a jobber or an agitator, is so powerless as in Ireland, and none, therefore, where the State can so well assume the function of arbiter between the "interests " and the people.
The last objection, that of patronage, is by far the most formidable of the three ; but it could, we believe, be to a great extent prevented by three devices, all of which would meet with approval from the House of Commons. The first is to entrust the special appointments, the officers' fitness for which cannot be tested by examination, to the head of the per- manent department, say, to Mr. Scudamore, and not to the Castle or its dependants ; the second, to make all clerical work whatever the subject of competition ; and the third, to give a definite preference in all manner of manual appointments, guards, porters, and the like, to men from the Army, Navy, or Militia. Those measures would re- duce patronage to moderate dimensions, at all events, and give new temptations to great numbers of men to enter the service of the Crown. Indeed, though we should not press that con- sideration, the existence of a new and fairly-paid " Service" in Ireland would not be of itself an evil, for if there is one fact about the island past dispute, it is that the Services, with rare exceptions, are faithful to their salt.
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