affect the cost of carriage to the railway company,” they said, “we are of opinion that the two kinds of coal ought to receive the same treatment.” If this principle had been carried out since the beginning of railways, if rates had been settled without regard to the value of merchandise, the prosperity of many districts and industries would never have been developed. In the second place, the cost of carriage is, inevitably, sometimes guessed at rather than calculated. We have already stated the nice calculations which must be entered into in order to determine the exact cost of carriage; calculations in which it is practically impossible to attain accuracy. Many elements in cost, the Commissioners cannot accurately measure; the data do not exist. In the third place, the effect of their later decisions is to exclude, practically, if not theoretically, competition from the considerations to be taken into account. This is, not only for the reasons already stated, contrary to sound commercial principles; it is contrary to the language of the early decisions of the Court of Common Pleas, which distinctly recognised competition as rightly taken into account in fixing rates. In _Garton_ v. _Bristol & Exeter Railway Co._ (1 N. & M. 1859, p. 218), for example, the Court of Common Pleas decided, among other reasons against the validity of a certain charge, because, in the words of Byles, J., “it is not shown that it is rendered necessary for the purpose of meeting and overcoming competition”.[100] The early judgments of the Railway Commissioners themselves recognised the right to take into account the existence of competition. In _Foreman_ v. _Great Eastern Railway Co._, decided in 1875 (2 N. & M. 202), the point in dispute was the validity of a scale of charges for the carriage of coal from Peterborough to Norwich and Great Yarmouth and intermediate stations. The Great Eastern Company were alleged to give an undue preference to coal consigned to such stations, as compared with the carriage of sea-borne coal from Great Yarmouth to Norwich and the stations between it and Peterborough. The Commissioners observed: “Nor does the Traffic Act prevent a railway company from having special rates of charges to a terminus to which traffic can be carried by other routes, or other modes of carriage with which theirs is in competition,” a dictum inconsistent with the view “that cost of service is the necessary measure of rates.” In a case decided the same year, _Thompson_ v. _London and North Western Railway Co._, 2 N. & M. (1875) 115, the Commissioners speak dubiously. They observe with respect to the argument that “the Traffic Act prohibits only undue advantages, and that an advantage given by a railway company to obtain traffic for which it competes with another railway company is not undue” (p. 120). “Such a proposition cannot, in our opinion, be laid down unreservedly. It may be true in certain circumstances;