Now the question arises whether American railway companies carry passengers at such rates with or without loss to themselves. If they are carried at a loss, an injustice is done to the regular passengers, whose fare must not only make up the loss, but yield a larger profit than would otherwise be necessary. If, on the other hand, a rate of half a cent a mile can be made remunerative, there is certainly no justice in maintaining rates five and six times as large on well-patronized lines. General Porter places stress upon our superior accommodations in the way of lighting, ventilation, ice-water, lavatories, and free carriage of baggage, etc., and then adds: "In this connection we must also recollect that the cost of fuel, wages and all construction materials is considerably higher here than in Europe, while the population from which the railways derive their support is much more sparse; the United States having 166,000 miles of railway with a population of 63,000,000, while Europe has only 135,000 miles with a population of 335,000,000." We grant the point which the General makes on ventilation, ice-water, etc.; but, to make the comparison a fair one, he should also have referred to the much greater cost of European roads, to their much greater number of employes per mile, to the much shorter haul, to the higher price of their fuel, to the superiority of their roadbed and the greater security of their passengers. Moreover, whether the railroads of a country are profitable or not cannot be ascertained by merely comparing miles of road with square miles of territory and number of inhabitants. British India has a population of 275,000,000 and only about 16,000 miles of railroad, and yet her roads are scarcely as profitable as our own. China has 3,000,000 and Asia has about 4,000,000 people to every mile of railroad, but so far their railroads have proved no bonanza. The question is not how many people there are to each mile of railroad, but rather to what extent the railroad is used by the people. The amount of freight carried annually by the railways of the United States is about 680,000,000 tons, or 85,000,000,000 ton miles, and the number of passengers carried is about 535,000,000, representing an aggregate of travel of nearly 13,000,000,000 miles. This shows an average of 1,300 tons of freight carried one mile, and 200 miles traveled annually for each inhabitant of the nation, and a greater use of railway facilities than that of any other country in the world. The income of the railroads per capita is $17 in the United States, $11 in the United Kingdom, $5 in Germany, $4 in France, and still less in Italy, Austria and Russia. The average freight haul is 63 miles in Europe and 120 miles in the United States; the average passenger haul 15 miles in Europe and 24 miles in the United States. It has already been shown that the average earnings per train mile are also larger here than there.