themselves readily to the new and better mechanism science produces
for them, electric traction, electric lighting and so forth; and it
seems to me highly probable that the last steam-engines and the last
oil lamps in the world will be found upon the southern railway lines
of Great Britain. How can they go on borrowing new capital with their
stock at the prices I have quoted, and how can they do anything
without new capital? The conception of profit-raising that rules our
railways takes rather an altogether different direction; it takes the
form of attempts to procure a monopoly even of the minor traffic by
resisting the development of light railways, and of keeping the
standard of comfort, decency and cleanliness low. As for the vast
social ameliorations that could be wrought now, and are urgently
needed now, by redistributing population through enhanced and
cheapened services scientifically planned, and by an efficient
collection and carriage of horticultural and agricultural produce,
these things lie outside the philosophy of the Private Owner
altogether. They would probably not pay him, and there the matter
ends; that they would pay the community enormously, does not for one
moment enter into his circle of ideas.

There can be little doubt that in the next decade or so the secular
decay and lagging of the British railway services which is inevitable
under existing conditions (in speed, in comfort, they have long been
distanced by continental lines), the probable increase in accidents
due to economically administered permanent ways and ageing stations
and bridges, and the ever more perceptible check to British economic
development due to this clogging of the circulatory system, will be of
immense value to the Socialist propaganda as an object lesson in
private ownership. In Italy the thing has already passed its
inevitable climax, and the State is now struggling valiantly to put a
disorganized, ill-equipped and undisciplined network of railways, the
legacy of a period of private enterprise, into tolerable working
order.

Sec. 6.

In a second great public service there is a perceptible, a growing
recognition of the evil and danger of allowing profit-seeking Private
Ownership to prevail; and that is the general food supply. A great
quickening of the public imagination in this matter has occurred
through the "boom" of Mr. Upton Sinclair's book, _The Jungle_--a book
every student of the elements of Socialism shou