This entire prospect has vast ramifications. In Great Britain the railways already are moving toward a use of the highroads in direct competition with the trucks and steam lorries of the independent traders. Their moves are not being made without opposition. At this moment it is difficult to tell whether or not they are to be given permission to go to the highroads themselves and there fight it out with their newest competitors. But whether they gain this point or lose it, the fact will remain that they show a real vision in the very suggestion. To an impartial observer it seems as if a railroad which almost always, if not absolutely always, is the largest taxpayer in any community would have certain inherent rights in the public highway which it is taxed so heavily to support. But whether or not ideas such as these are practical things or merely the fancies of a dreamer, the fact remains that our American railroads, obsessed by the possibilities of through or long-haul freight traffic, have as a rule ignored the vast extensive possibilities of the short-haul, which may be set down as one of the damnable heritages of our competitive railroad system. They do this intensive cultivation of traffic far better in France, which long ago discarded the competitive principle as both foolish and extravagant. Let me illustrate. Not many months ago I found myself in the little, obsolete Atlantic fishing-port of Les Sables d'Olonne, in the Vendee country almost half-way between St. Nazaire and La Rochelle. Up to the stout stone quays of that picturesque enclosed harbor there ran three types of railway, each of them rather typically French. The first was the standard-gage (four feet, eight and one half inches) branch of the State Railway system which connected Les Sables d'Olonne with a main line, and so, with all the rail lines of the rest of France and of Europe. There was a sixty-centimeter (twenty-four inches) narrow-gage also at the railway terminal and the quays; as well as a third at the harbor-side of but forty-centimeter gage. This last interested me tremendously. Its tiny rails, spaced a bare eighteen inches apart, seemed so inefficient; and yet they told me that it had been in successful existence for many years past. "It is the _poisson_ line," they explained. "The what?" I asked. "The road that reaches out along the beaches and brings the fish into the big ten-ton cars that await it here at the railway terminal," was the further explanation. I understood. That was correlated rail transport--the tiny engine (it was hardly larger than those that are operated for the delectation of children at country fairs) and its little cars were an active and efficient feeder for the big main railroad system of the republic. Intensified transport, in its largest sense.