250,000,000 at 1/- £12,500,000 Add 25,000,000 at 4/- for First Class 5,000,000 ----------- £17,500,000 =========== This will bring the gross receipts from passengers to £46,750,000, with =an increase of about 15 per cent. only= on the present total number of passengers carried, and £1,750,000 more revenue. The criticism may be made, however, that this number is nearly double the existing number of long distance passengers. Will such an increase be realised? From a consideration of the following reasons it is submitted that not only will it be so, but that in point of fact a much larger increase may reasonably be anticipated. 1. No account as to passenger traffic has been taken of the normal increase in the number of passengers which has continued to increase regularly with the increase of population. 2. Under the proposed scheme the uniform fares are for _as far as the train travels only_, so that a journey say from London to Londonderry will involve at least three 1s. tickets, one to Holyhead, a second from Holyhead to Dublin, and a third from Dublin to Londonderry, whereas under the present system one through ticket would be purchased and would appear in the official returns as one journey only. 3. In practice nearly every single journey undertaken means _a return journey home_, so that an increase of 250,000,000 more passenger journeys does not involve a greater increase in the movement of the population than is represented by, say, 150,000,000 passengers. 4. If the number of passengers carried by the railways is compared with the population it may be noted that the total number of passengers carried last year in the Tube and Suburban Railways of London, with a population of between six and seven millions, was about 500,000,000 in addition to about the same number carried by omnibuses, and a further similar number by tramways. A similar proportion of railway passengers to the population of the United Kingdom of nearly 50 millions would be over 4,000,000,000 per annum, so that an actual total of 1,850,000,000 would undoubtedly be much less than may reasonably be anticipated.