Identifier: empirecentury00gold (find matches)
Title: The empire and the century
Year: 1905 (1900s)
Authors: Goldman, Charles Sydney Kipling, Rudyard, 1865-1936
Subjects: Imperial federation
Publisher: London, John Murray
Contributing Library: University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Digitizing Sponsor: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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ed of30 letters a minute. Hence the cables are landed inCanada or Newfoundland, as constituting a convenienthalf-way house on the road to the rich American trafficcentres. It is by being allowed to collect a portionof that traffic in the United States by the agency oftheir American connections that our five British cableschiefly maintain their power to live. In return for thisprivilege allowed us by the Americans, we must grantthe Americans the privilege of landing their cables inCanada on the way to Europe, (c) No doubt if theAmerican-owned cables were beating our cables out ofthe field, it would become a question whether, inspite of the above observations, our Government shouldallow such cables to utilize British territory for thatpurpose. The next point worth noticing is as regards the tariffcharged over the Atlantic cables. A message fromLondon to Montreal costs Is. a word. Of this theGovernment of this country receives about Jd. perword for transmitting the message from London to
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FLUCTUATING CABLE TARIFFS 253 Ireland, and for rental of land-lines leased to the com-panies. The Canadian land-line rate is about 2d. perword, and thus is left as the amount actually received by the Cable Companies out of the total Is.rate. Cable tariffs, like other things, have their history andevolution. Although the permanent connection withCanada was established in 1866, it was not till 1872that the system of charging so much per word wasintroduced. The tariff then fixed was 4s. per word.From 1872 up to 1888 the changes in the tariff weremost bewildering; in those sixteen years there were noless than thirteen changes of tariff. But at last, in1888, it was fixed at Is., and there it has remained eversince. The cause of these frequent fluctuations has been themore or less fierce struggle waged in the Atlantic, withsome intermissions, since 1868, when the French enteredthe field in rivalry with the British. In 1881 Americanrivalry began under the auspices of Mr. Jay Gould, andbecame

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