In view of these efforts to get every aggrieved or discontented person to come forward and disclose his complaint, is it possible to imagine that there are now any concealed complaints? It is often said that traders will not complain, that they are afraid of rousing the hostility of those terrible tyrants, the railways, whose power in England, at any rate, whatever it may be in America, is ludicrously exaggerated. It is true that a sensible trader who has a fair case does not fly with it to the Board of Trade. He submits it to the railway officers in the ordinary daily course of business, and almost invariably gets the matter adjusted. But I do not believe that there is any trader who would be deterred from submitting a complaint to the Board of Trade by any feeling of fear. On the contrary, traders in these days suffer from an excess of boldness. If a trader is dissatisfied with any railway charge, he simply refuses to pay, and only those who have experience of the daily conduct of railway business can know how common, and unfortunately how effective, this remedy is.
The Board of Trade make an annual report to Parliament of all complaints made to them under their conciliation jurisdiction, and I think the contents of these reports may fairly be relied on as presenting a complete view of the kind of complaints that exist against railways. A useful table is given in the tenth report of the Board of Trade, issued in July last, showing the total number of complaints for ten years, classified according to their nature as follows:
| No. per | |||
| Total. | annum. | ||
| 1. | Rates unreasonable or excessive in themselves or which were unreasonably increased | 715 | 71.5 |
| 2. | Undue preference | 352 | 35.2 |
| 3. | Sundry complaints | 510 | 51 |
| —— | —— | ||
| 1,577 | 157.7 |
Of the total number forty-eight were complaints against canal companies, but these are not separated in the classification.
Surely the above is a remarkable table, considering the vast aggregate of business and the facilities offered for complaints. Only 1,529 complaints against railways, or an average of about 153 per annum, have been found to exist.
Then look at the results of these complaints. These are given in another table, and only 573 complaints, or an average of 57 per annum, are entered as resulting in the complainants finally expressing themselves as dissatisfied.
Services for which the aggregate payment amounts to 120 millions sterling per annum are rendered, and yet there are only an average of fifty-seven cases per annum of dissatisfied complainants to the most open, most favorable, and least costly tribunal in the world for hearing complaints against railways.
Now let us look at the nature of the complaints made. Would State ownership remedy any of these complaints? I set aside the 510 cases of miscellaneous complaints about delay in transit and other minor matters, because it is obvious that complaints about such matters would not disappear under any conceivable system of railway management.
Practically all other complaints group themselves under two heads: