confer great public benefits while paying good dividends to their shareholders. But we must see to it that proper conditions are observed. And the first and most vital of these is that no company must be allowed to lay any tram or other line along a road unless they agree at their own charges to increase the width of the metalled surface of the road by the width of the largest car which they propose to place on the road—say eight feet. If this condition is not insisted on, we shall see our roads, already far too narrow, seriously reduced. To lay rails and then to run huge cars, often in double lines, as between Kew and Hammersmith, is in effect to produce a most material narrowing of the road. When a road is given over to a tramway company without any increase in its metalled surface, it becomes at once distinctly less valuable for ordinary traffic. By allowing tram-lines to be laid without any corresponding widening of the roads, as has been done hitherto on our suburban roads, we are positively going back, actually making our roads less open to traffic than they were. No doubt it will be said that to demand this increase of the metalled road surface is to lay on the tramways a burden greater than they can bear. I cannot agree. To begin with their prospective profits are very large. Next, the extra expense would not be very serious, because to increase the metalled surface by eight feet could in the case of most of our country main roads be accomplished without buying more land. There is always a strip of land on each side available for widening. To level and metal, and then lay the lines there, would not be very much more costly, and certainly much more convenient to the public, than to tear up the existing road and put the lines there. I venture then to suggest that no local authority should be empowered to give its consent to any scheme for laying lines along its roads unless the company proposing the scheme agreed to widen the metalled surface by the width of its cars. Provision might of course be made for a dispensing power in exceptional and peculiar cases. No one would want to shave off the façade of an Elizabethan
