It is impossible to review, even in the merest outline, the railroad history of all the countries in the world, but the instances already given will serve to illustrate my proposition that the position in each country depends not on abstract considerations, but on the practical facts of the local situation. Yet one cannot look round the world and fail to recognize that the connection between the railroads and the state is everywhere becoming more intimate year by year. Whatever have been the causes, the fact remains that Italy and Switzerland have converted their railroads from private to public. In Germany the few remaining private lines are becoming still fewer. In Belgium the process is practically completed. In Austria it is moving steadily in the same direction; four-fifths of the total mileage is now operated by the state. In Russia the story would have been the same, had it not been for the war with Japan. Even in France, whose railroads have a very definite local and national history of their own, an act for the purchase of the Western Railway by the state was passed last year by the Chamber of Deputies, and has now, after much contention, been passed by the Senate within the last few weeks. But it is not without interest to note that, though a majority both of deputies and of senators supported the bill, the representatives of the district served by the company were by a large majority opposed to it, while the commercial community of the whole of France, as represented by the Chambers of Commerce, were almost unanimously hostile.[I] So far as can be seen at present, the purchase of the Western Railway by the state is not likely to be made a precedent for the general nationalization of the French railroads. Still, the broad fact remains that a series of railroad maps of the continent of Europe, constructed at intervals of ten years, would undoubtedly show an ever-increasing proportion of state lines, and that the last of the series would exhibit the private lines as very far below the state lines both in extent and in volume of traffic.