Such a policy as this would be unjust, not alone to the railway shareholders, but also to those traders who had continued to use the railway lines, since it is obvious that the heavier the burdens imposed on the railway companies in the shape of local rates (which already form such substantial items in their "working expenses"), the less will the companies concerned be in a position to grant the concessions they might otherwise be willing to make. Besides, apart from monetary considerations, the principle of the thing would be intolerably unfair, and, if only to avoid an injustice, it would surely be enacted that any possible increase in local rates, due to the failure of particular schemes of canal municipalisation, should fall exclusively on the traders and the general public who were to have been benefited, and in no way on the railway companies against whom the commercially unsuccessful competition had been waged. This proposition will, I am sure, appeal to that instinct of justice and fair play which every Englishman is (perhaps not always rightly), assumed to possess. But what would happen if it were duly carried out, as it ought to be? Well, in the Chapter on "Taxation of Railways" in my book on "Railways and their Rates," I gave one list showing that in a total of eighty-two parishes a certain British railway company paid an average of 60·25 per cent. of the local rates; while another table showed that in sixteen specified parishes the proportion of local rates paid by the same railway company ranged from 66·9 per cent. to 86·1 per cent. of the total, although in twelve parishes out of the sixteen the company had not even a railway station in the place. But if, in all such parishes as these, the railway companies were very properly excused from having to make good the losses incurred by their municipalised-canal competitors (in addition to such losses as they might have already suffered in meeting the competition), then the full weight of the burden would fall upon that smaller--and, in some cases, that very small--proportion of the general body of ratepayers in the locality concerned. The above is just a little consideration, _en passant_, which might be borne in mind by others than those who look at the subject only from a trader's or an engineer's point of view. It will help, also, to strengthen my contention that any ill-advised, or, at least, unsuccessful municipalisation of the canal system of the country might have serious consequences for the general body of the community, who, in the circumstances, would do well to "look before they leap."