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Updated: May 5, 2025
They suggested, further, that the official statistics of various countries showed that the fall in the average rate had been much greater on the privately owned railways of France and the United States than on the State-owned railways of Prussia, which were universally accepted as the most favourable example of State managed railways in the world.
This property and its predecessors had to some extent been state-owned enterprises at first, but in 1870 the Pennsylvania Railroad interests acquired control. A holding company called the Southern Railway Securities Company was now formed for the purpose of controlling all the Pennsylvania Railroad interests south of Washington.
The Italians have high hopes of harnessing their nine millions of horsepower in Alpine water-falls, running their state-owned railroads and public utilities with it, and introducing electricity as an industrial power into Italian homes, thus bringing back to the homes of the people the home industries like weaving which steam took away a century ago. But this is only a dream.
On the other hand, this arrangement exposed the cargoes to condemnation by the English prize courts as they were now State-owned. But Herr Albert could assume and, as it turned out, rightly that so long as the English respected neutral property, it would be difficult as a rule to trace the shipments back to him. Otherwise there would have been no security for a German private undertaking.
Even prior to the war Germany had placed hundreds of thousands of persons upon the state-owned farms and on private estates which had been acquired by the government for this purpose. Over $400,000,000 has been appropriated for the purpose of encouraging home-ownership in Germany during recent years.
The herding of people in the fourth- class carriages in Germany resembles our cattle-cars rather than transportation for human beings. Such conditions would not be tolerated in America, but against these state-owned railways there is no redress. No luggage, except hand luggage, is carried free.
It also keeps labour statistics, acts as a servants' registry office, and by publishing information, and by shifting them from congested districts, endeavours to keep down the numbers of the unemployed. In this, though it is but a palliative, it has done useful and humane work, aided so far as the circulation of labour goes by the State-owned railways.
On the state-owned railways of the west of France the break-down is ludicrously complete, and the people are staggered by the official estimates that it will require at least $100,000,000 to put them in decent running order.
The dynamite monopoly, by which the miners had to pay 600,000l. extra per annum in order to get a worse quality of dynamite; the liquor laws, by which the Kaffirs were allowed to be habitually drunk; the incompetence and extortions of the State-owned railway; the granting of concessions for numerous articles of ordinary consumption to individuals, by which high prices were maintained; the surrounding of Johannesburg by tolls from which the town had no profit these were among the economical grievances, some large, some petty, which ramified through every transaction of life.
If you asked a State-owned railway to gamble on the chance of drawing tourists, the Commissioner of Railways would prove to you that the experiment could never succeed, and that it was wrong to risk the taxpayers' money in erecting first-class hotels. Yet South Africa could, even now, be made a tourists' place if only the railroads and steamship lines had faith.
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