Mr. Scudamore's concluding argument was that little or no relief from the evils from which the public was suffering could be expected "so long as the working of the telegraphs was conducted by commercial companies striving chiefly to earn a dividend, and engaged in wasteful competition." In support of the charge of wasteful competition he stated "that many large districts are provided with duplicate and triplicate lines, worked by different companies, but taking much the same course and serving precisely the same places; and that these duplicate or triplicate lines and duplicate or triplicate offices only divide the business without materially increasing the accommodation of the districts or towns which they serve." But when Mr. Scudamore sought to substantiate this charge of waste arising out of competition, he could do no more than state that not less than 2,000 miles of line in a total of 16,066 miles were redundant, and that perhaps 300 to 350 offices in a total of 2,040 offices were redundant. * * * * * The evidence presented by Mr. Scudamore failed to reveal a situation that called for so drastic a remedy as the nationalization of the telegraphs. It revealed no evils or shortcomings that it was unreasonable to expect would be sufficiently mitigated, if not entirely removed, by the measures proposed by the telegraph companies. Mr. Robert Grimston, Chairman of the Electric and International Telegraph Company, stated that the telegraph companies long since would have asked Parliament to permit them to consolidate, had there been the least likelihood of Parliament granting the request. Consolidation would have made the resulting amalgamated company so strong that the company would have been justified in adopting a bolder policy in the matter of extending the telegraph lines to places remote from the railways. No single company could afford to assume too large a burden of lines that would begin as "suckers" rather than "feeders." A company with a large burden of that kind would be in a precarious position, because any of the other existing companies, or some new company, might take advantage of the situation and cut heavily into that part of the company's business that was carried on between the large cities and was bearing the burden of the non-paying extensions. But if the existing companies were to consolidate, the resulting company would become so strong that it need not fear such competition from any company newly to be organized. That there was much strength in that argument appears from the fact that, in 1869, Mr. Scudamore as well as the Government adopted it in support of the request that the State be given the monopoly of the business of transmitting messages by electricity. Mr. Scudamore argued that since the State was going to assume the burden of building and operating a large number of unprofitable, or relatively unprofitable, extensions, it should not be exposed to the possibility