The application of the new Schedule forcibly reduced many rates, inflicting much loss upon the companies, and because the companies advanced other rates (within the limits of the new maximum powers of course) to meet this loss, or to meet it to some extent, a storm of abuse arose and swept across the land.  A trader from Berwick-on-Tweed, more frank than most, wrote the following “characteristic” letter as it was called at the time:—­

“What we want is to have our fish carried at half present rates.  We don’t care a —–­ whether it pays the railways or not.  Railways ought to be made to carry for the good of the country, or they should be taken over by the Government.  That is what all Traders want and mean to try to get.”

Perhaps they would not be happy if they got it!  In his clear, and most interesting book Railways and Their Rates, my friend Edwin A. Pratt says this letter was quoted in the Report which the Board of Trade made to Parliament after their 85 days’ Inquiry.  The railway companies announced that the new rates were in no sense final, that the time allowed them was insufficient for proper revision, that they would give an assurance that no increase would be made that would interfere with trade or agriculture or diminish traffic and that, unless under exceptional circumstances, no increase would in any case exceed 5 per cent.  But all was in vain, and Parliament passed an Act which provided that any increase whatever (though within the limits of the new statutory maximum) if complained of, should be heard and decided upon by the Railway Commissioners, and that the onus of proving the reasonableness of the increase should rest on the railway company.  Sir Alexander (then Mr.) Butterworth, in his book on The Law Relating to Maximum Rates and Charges on Railways, published in 1897, says this remarkable result is presented:  that Parliament, “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 that the charge was within any limit fixed by an Act of Parliament.”  Thus Parliament, yielding to popular clamour, stultified itself, and in feverish haste to placate an angry and noisy public tied the hands of the railway companies, doing, I believe, more harm than good.  This legislation naturally made the companies very cautious in reducing a rate because of the difficulties to be encountered should circumstances require them to raise it again, and railway rates thus lost that element of elasticity and adaptability so essential to the development of trade.  Many a keen and enterprising business man have I heard lament the restrictions that Parliament imposed and declare that such interference with the freedom of trade was short-sighted in the extreme and bad for the country.