8s. 9d. per word, according to the different places touched on the coast. Now it has been reduced to 4s, 5d. uniformly, having fallen by three different stages. Of course, the British company carrying the traffic from China to Madras receive only a small proportion of this amount. The Chinese take the large average terminal rate of 11d., and the Cis-Indian administrations take 2s. 2½d., whilst India's share is 3½d., or a total of 3s. 5d. Thus 1s. is left to the British company.
The lesson of the Far East is surely too obvious to need repetition. In that region, as elsewhere, British cable enterprise is rivalled and assailed on all hands and in every quarter by foreign nations. It will survive if the British Government is reasonably friendly and helpful to its own citizens. But if the latter are to be competed with by their own Government, then our position, such as it is, in the Far East, will be fatally compromised. Our cables, become unprofitable, will be sold to our American and German rivals, and British enterprise will vanish from that ocean, which now, in the phrase of Gibbon, is the scene of the world's debate.
Commercial Codes and the 'Social Code.'
In discussing all questions of rates, it should be borne in mind that over 90 per cent. of messages transmitted by cable are commercial messages, and also that of these commercial messages 'something like 95 per cent. are carried on by code.'[1] Taking one of the small private commercial codes actually in use, I find that the whole code gives an average of 27·93 plain language words represented by one code word. Therefore, if the published rate, e.g., to India, is 2s., the actual cost to the merchant is only ⅞ of 1d. per word. For instance, the five code words, Crampoon, Acacia, Spring, Polvorillar, Rahtfen, represent a message which, if expressed in
- ↑ Speech of Sir John Wolfe Barry, Chairman of the Eastern Telegraph Company, July 17, 1901.
