The French railways are non-competitive, yet bow to no one in the thoroughness and the attractiveness of their advertising--the quality of their transportation salesmanship. It is a part of their intensive railway management. Is it not about time that we heard a little more of intensive management of our railroads, both in their operation and in the solicitation of their traffic? Here is a vital principle of transport in the United States--speaking generally now and not specifically of the railroads alone--that apparently has been considerably overlooked in recent years. In a large sense it is an economy as well. I think that I have shown by this time the economy and necessity of systematically developed transport applied evenly to the entire land, and not, through the efforts of that false god of competition, spread thick here and thin there. This vital principle was completely overlooked in the minds of the politicians who as a tentative American railroad policy gave us a "competitive consolidation" of our roads. Seemingly competition was indeed their god. "How can such fine industrial cities as Rochester or Akron or Dayton or Grand Rapids thrive and continue to thrive without railroad competition?" they asked, apparently forgetting that for many years such fine industrial cities as Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford, and Providence have not alone lived but thriven and continued to grow greatly without railroad competition. In the old days before it had entered upon its financial skylarkings and was content to remain a well-ordered servant of its community, the New York, New Haven, and Hartford railroad showed that it could render in a non-competitive territory service quite as good as its fellows of the competitive territories. Competition was not the thing that made or broke the New Haven service; it was income, outgo, human morale, even regulation, if you please, but not competition. The vision of Charles S. Mellen that New England should one day become a great non-competitive railroad territory was a very real and a very far-sighted one. It is only with the method by which he sought to bring it into actual being that one may beg to differ. In no other land of the world is the competitive theory in transport being pushed forward to-day. In fact the tendency is decidedly in the other direction. It was to observe this tendency--the distinct effort to eliminate competition and bring cooperation and harmony between European railway properties--that I journeyed overseas not long since. And in the next of these chapters I shall set forth some of my observations on the regional railway situation in France (where it has long obtained) and in Great Britain (where it is just now being established), particularly as our future prospects here in the United States are affected.