If a century and a half ago the world had submitted its problems of transport to the economists they would have put aside, with as little wasted breath and ink as possible, all talk about railways, motor-cars, steamships and aeroplanes, and, with a fine sense of extravagance rebuked, set themselves to long neuralgic dissertations, disputations and treatises upon high-roads and the methods of connecting them, turnpike gates, canals, the influence of lock-fees on bargemen, tidal landing places, anchorages, surplus carrying capacity, carriers, caravans, hand-barrows and the pedestrianariat. There would have been a rapid and easy differentiation in feeling and requirements between the horse-owning minority and the walking majority; the wrongs of the latter would have tortured the mind of every philosopher who could not ride and been minimised by every philosopher who could, and there would have been a broad rift between the narrow footpath school, the no footpath school and the school which would look forward to a time when every horse would have to be led along one universal footpath under the dictatorship of the pedestrianariat. All with the profoundest gravity and dignity. These things, footpaths and roads and canals with their traffic, were “real,” and “Utopian” projects for getting along at thirty or forty miles an hour or more up hill and against wind and tide, let alone the still more incredible suggestion of air transport, would have been smiled and sneered out of court. Life went about on its legs, with a certain assistance from wheels, or floated, rowed and was blown about on water; so it had been--and so it would always be. But as soon as this time-honoured pre-occupation with the allotment of the shares of originators, organisers, workers, owners of material, credit dealers and tax collectors in the total product, ceases to be dealt with as the primary question in economics, as soon as we liberate our minds from a pre-occupation which from the outset necessarily makes that science a squabble rather than a science, and begin our attack upon the subject with a survey of the machinery and other productive material required in order that the staple needs of mankind should be satisfied, if we go on from that to consider the way in which all this material and machinery can be worked and the product distributed with the least labour and the greatest possible satisfaction, we shift our treatment of economic questions towards standards by which all current methods of exploitation, employment and finance can be judged rather than wrangle over. We can dismiss the question of the claims of this sort of participant or that for later and subordinate consideration, and view each variety of human assistance in the general effort entirely from the standpoint of what makes that assistance least onerous and most effective.