t seeks to do as little as possible for as much
as possible. The prosperity of all Kent is crippled by a "combine" of
two ill-managed and unenterprising railway companies, with no funds
for new developments, grinding out an uncertain dividend by clipping
expenditure.

I happen to see this organization pretty closely, and I can imagine no
State enterprise west of Turkey or Persia presenting even to the
passing eye so deplorable a spectacle of ruin and inefficiency. The
South-Eastern Company's estate at Seabrook presents the dreariest
spectacle of incompetent development conceivable; one can see its
failure three miles away; it is a waste with an embryo slum in one
corner protected by an extravagant sea-wall, already partly shattered,
from the sea.

To-day (Nov. 4, 1907) the price of the ordinary South-Eastern stock is
65 and its deferred stock 31; of the London, Chatham and Dover
ordinary stock 10-1/2; an eloquent testimony to the disheartened state
of the owners who now cling reluctantly to this disappointing
monopoly. Spite of this impoverishment of the ordinary shareholder,
this railway system has evidently paid too much profit in the past for
efficiency; the rolling stock is old and ageing--much of it is by
modern standards abominable--the trains are infrequent, and the
shunting operations at local stations, with insufficient sidings and
insufficient staffs, produce a chronic dislocation and unpunctuality
in the traffic that is exaggerated by the defects of direction evident
even in the very time-tables. The trains are not well planned, the
connections with branch lines are often extremely ill managed. The
service is bad to its details. It is the exception rather than the
rule to find a ticket-office in the morning with change for a
five-pound note; and, as a little indication of the spirit of the
whole machine, I discovered the other day that the conductors upon the
South-Eastern trams at Hythe start their morning with absolutely no
change at all. Recently the roof of the station at Charing Cross fell
in--through sheer decay.... A whole rich county now stagnates
hopelessly under the grip of this sample of private enterprise, towns
fail to grow, trade flows sluggishly from point to point. No
population in the world would stand such a management as it endures at
the hands of the South-Eastern Railway from any responsible public
body. Out would go the whole board of managers at the next election.
Consider what would