| TUESDAY, OCTOBER 5, 1920, i THE DAILY BRITISH WHIG. Your Railways And The Cost of Living B EFORE the Privy Cowell at Ottawa protest against the new railway rates has been made on the gromnds that the giving of the new rates would raise the cost of living by a percentage many times higher than the percentage actually charged by the Canadian railways. It was pointed ont that the numerous middlemen who act as the distributors of goods would each add his per- centage of profit to the freight rate, so that although the railways might only receive say 40 cents additional - freight charge on a shipment the public would be forced, by. the distributing middlemen, to pay many times that amount. The managements of the various Canadian railways de- sire, through this, their association, to draw the atten- tion of newspaper readers to the highly significant fact that the recent increase in United States railway rates-- an increase similar to the increase in Canada--has ac- tually been followed by a decrease in the cost of living in that country. Furthermore A great Canadian manufacturer recently made public-- without any solicitation and without the previous know- ledge of the railway managements-figures which prov- ed that the retail selling price of a yard of plain white cloth in Winnipeg after being hauled from Montreal fo Toronto and Toronto to Winnipeg, would be increased only one-half a cent even after the wholesaler had added 20p.c. profi to the new freight rate and the retailers an- other 50 p.c. He showed that these distributors, whether rightly or wrongly, added 15 cents to his mill-price of 16 cents pava, - 263 St. James Street . i Yet the railways carried the raw cotton for this yard of goods from Texas to Montreal, and the finished goods from the mill to Toronto and Toronto to Winnipeg for one-and-one-half cents. One-and-one-half cents as against fifteen cents. We ven- ture to believe that, whatever the explanation or the jus- tification may be, the same serious additions to cost by the distributing trades will be found in relation to almost every article of common household use. Thisis not to attack distributors. They may themselves be victims of a bad system or of an over-crowded trade, But it is to point out that if they add whatever percent- ages they, as a trade, find convenient, on top of the freight rates, the railways cannot help either themselves or the public. The oppressive results of these practices should not be cliarged against the railway managements nor cited as reasons for holding freight rates down-- merely because railway rates can be held down--while other prices soar as the various trades find necessary. R AILWAY charges must be a serious item in de- termining cost of production. But the manage- ments of your railways urge upon your attention this fact: that antiquated, over-loaded and wasteful sys- tems of distributing goods are much more properly a subject for public anxiety Canada cannot prosper without prosperous railways. Canadian railways cannot pros- per unless Canada prospers. In all sincerity let us suggest that the people of Canada beware of those who would restrict and even strangle the railways simply because control exists there and is "not 50 convenient in other departments of commercial activity. The Railway Association of Canada - Montreal, P.Q. 3 Sey LS fis i Sgn A pling