In the opinion of distinguished French engineers this single enterprise will be far the greatest, from an economic point of view, ever undertaken in France. Yet this is but the beginning. The Paris-Orleans has also ambitious plans under which it expects to bring electric energy, water-generated, to more than one-half of its 3250 miles of line. The Midi, running for miles along the base of the Pyrenees, has abundant opportunities for this cheap motive-power. Its management is unusually progressive and it may be expected to take advantage of these in the not distant future. The net result of this great national economy will be the annual saving of many millions of tons of coal in a land which has no fuel to spare, which is indeed dependent upon coal importations for her very existence, let alone the development of her industries. Yet great as this huge economic step will yet prove itself for France, it still will remain secondary to her wisdom of the long-ago in the simplification of her entire operating system by means of the sensible and logical regional railway plan, with its consequent huge basic economies. France at the beginning started right. She is even to-day reaping the benefit of them. To-morrow when her other economic conditions shall have readjusted themselves she will reap a far greater benefit. The largest achievements of her regional plan are still in the future. * * * * * England has long since taken note of the situation in her neighbor just across the Channel. She has seen her own salvation in the French solution of the extravagant luxury of railway duplication. And even a traditional British prejudice against borrowing an idea from another nation has finally been broken down--in this particular instance very much broken down. Yet it is entirely probable that, had it not been for the coming of the World War, the Briton still would be enjoying the wasteful luxury of the excess service which his extravagant competitive system--very much like our own--had given him for many years. For it was extravagance, nothing more, nothing less, that led each of the three railways binding the cities of Liverpool and Manchester, about thirty miles apart, to run an hourly service between those cities. The trains might run two thirds or three quarters empty, and frequently did, but the pride of the London and Northwestern, the Lancashire and Yorkshire, and the Cheshire lines was upheld. Competition is a great upholder of pride.