Page:The international development of China (IA developmentchina00suny).pdf/42

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22
THE INTERNATIONAL

it. While with a railway between a thickly populated country and a sparsely settled or unsettled country, as soon as it is opened to traffic for each mile, the masses of the congested country will use it and rush into the new land in a wholesale manner. Thus the railway will be employed to its utmost capacity in passenger traffic from the beginning. The comparison between the Peking-Hankow Railway and the Peking-Mukden Railway in China is a convincing proof.

The Peking-Hankow Railway is a line of over eight hundred miles running from the capital of the country to the commercial center in the heart of China right along in an extraordinarily densely settled country from end to end. While the Peking-Mukden line is barely six hundred miles in length running from a thickly populated country to thinly populated Manchuria. The former is a well paying line but the latter pays far better. The net profit of the shorter Peking-Mukden Line is sometimes three to four millions more yearly than that of the longer Peking-Hankow line.

Therefore, it is logically clear that a railway in a thickly populated country is much better than one that is in a thinly populated country in remuneration. But a railway between a very thickly populated and a very thinly populated or unpopulated country is the best paying proposition. This is a law in Railway Economics which hitherto had not been discovered by railway men and financiers.

According to this new railway economic law, our projected railway will be the best remunerative pro-