or vice versa, is certainly a good deal above the average charge. Now 50 shillings equals 600 pence, and therefore a 50 shilling rate per ton is in other words a rate, ., or say, $ of a penny on every pound weight conveyed. Consider at what rate this charge works out to the consumer. Is it not a percentage of the total sum which he pays so small as to be scarcely noticeable? Take tea, for instance, sold to the north of England for 2s. per pound. The railway charge on this amounts to little over one per cent. of the retail price. Is the Yorkshireman soft-headed enough to believe that, if the railway carried his tea gratis, he would get the very slightest concession in price from his friend the grocer? Or turn it the other way round; the Bradford goods which go up to London to pay for this tea are worth on the average certainly not less than 9s. 6d. per pound. And out of this the railway claims once more of one penny, or less than one per cent. . . . But we are often told—though the reasons for a statement which on the face of it is questionable are never produced—that it is not fair to calculate percentage on retail costs. We must consider the weight of the burthen laid upon the wholesale dealer. Let us do so, therefore, and imagine a London commission merchant engaged in the Bradford trade, and turning out say, £150,000 a year. This at 2s. 6d. per pound, once more (and though some of his goods may be worth a little less, the finer qualities will be worth ten times as much) would imply that he sold 536 tons per annum. Suppose that half of it comes to London at the local rate of 43s. 4d. and half at the export rate of 35s., his total expenditure, therefore, on railway carriage, or cartage, is a little over £1000 a year. Now imagine an all-round reduction of 10s. per ton in all these rates—and the chairman of the Railway Committee of the Bradford Chamber of Commerce declared in 1881 that such a reduction would bring salvation to a perishing industry—the London merchant would save £9.68 per annum.'
Assuming that he gave the customer the whole benefit of the reduction, 10 shillings a ton, when reduced to the price in yards, represents, as Mr. Acworth observes, ' an amount too fractional to be represented in English currency.'
There is the same difficulty in determining the ultimate incidence of cost of transport as in ascertaining the incidence of taxation on commodities. A priori speculations on the subject are apt to be fruitless and delusive. A minute study of the economic conditions at the time when a tax is levied or the rate is charged is necessary. Professor Sax, discussing this point in his work Die Verkehrsmittel,[1] lays it down that the greater the exchangeable value of the article, the less is the influence of freight. Of undoubted consequence is the number of intermediaries between production and consumption. The more they are, the greater the risk that the advantage of a reduction of freight will
- ↑ P. 25
