CHAPTER VII

THE BLIGHT ON AGRICULTURE

^ The damaging effects of the present railway policy are
clearly traceable in the continued depression under which
British agriculture has languished. The first cause of this
depression is undoubtedly to be found in the flagrant anomalies
of our land system. But among the contributory causes high
and preferential railway rates will certainly rank as the most
potent. Mr. Balfour Browne, Q.C., in an interesting paper
which he presented to the London Chamber of Commerce on
February lo, 1897, even went to the extent of declaring that —
" I am not exaggerating when I say that the agricultural
question, which has been attempted to be met very ineffectively
by a palliative Agricultural Rates Bill, is nothing else but a
question of railway rates." ^

Our Legislature wisely abolished the restrictions which gave
British farmers an artificial monopoly in com in the home
market, to the hurt of the community as a whole. And any
direct attempt to go back upon the policy of free trade would
certainly meet with ignominious defeat. Yet, it is scarcely too
much to say that what the country would sternly resist if
openly attempted, they have quietly permitted our Railway
Companies to do in a more insidious way. With an important
distinction, however. While the old import duties imposed by
the State created a monopoly in favour of the British farmer
in the home market, the modern preferential transport-tax
exacted by the Railway Companies frequently gives the foreign
producer a monopoly here, to the exclusion of our own farmers.
^ London Chamber of Commerce, Pamphlet Series No. 22 (1897).
