The area of France is roughly speaking about equal to that of our five great industrial States reaching from New York to Chicago--New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. This section of the United States contains but about thirty-five millions of people, as compared with forty millions of French, yet it has approximately twice the railway mileage. The French have buttered their area pretty evenly with their railway transport. We have not. In these five industrial States of ours there is not only in many cases gross duplication and excess of plant--in most cases due to the effects of overstimulated competition--but in other cases considerable territories even to-day inadequately provided with railroad facilities. Our bread is by no means buttered evenly. Neither is Great Britain's. Like ourselves she built her transport plans to meet the exigencies of actual conditions from year to year. Add to this her very irregularity of conformation; her chief city, and forever her traffic hub, situated nowhere near the center of the congested island, but almost in an extreme southeastern corner of it; her other great cities, seaport and inland industrial centers, scattered here and there and everywhere as the chance fortune of long centuries dictated and separated by high ridges of mountainous hills. Take conditions such as these and you have the beginnings of a transport problem that even at the outset would bewilder the wisest of traffic experts, given the rare opportunity of devising an entire new railway system for the United Kingdom. Of course, no such wise or scientific scheme of planning her railways was ever possible. They grew, as I have just said, out of necessity. From the crude beginnings of the Stockton and Darlington and the Liverpool and Manchester, almost an even century ago, they advanced clumsily until nearly twenty years ago, when the last of the trunk-lines forced its way into London and the competitive development of the British railway system was virtually ended. The strategy of thrusting a new line here, of building a connection there, of piercing into this town or that so as to get the business away from the other road, then became history. Thereafter the chief problem of the British railway manager, like that of his fellow executive in the United States, became that of supplying proper transport to a nation that refused to "stay put," but insisted upon growing, even to an unthinkable size. In the years of its railway development the population of Great Britain has increased from fifteen or sixteen millions to well over forty-two. In a single one of her cities more than seven million people are now resident.