This is not the place to discuss in detail the form that control should take, but one or two general observations seem worth making. The leading example of executive control is France; in that country the system is worked out with all the French neatness and all the French logic. But it is impossible to imagine the French principle being transplanted here. For one thing, the whole French railroad finance rests upon the guarantee of the government. The French government pays, or at least is liable to pay, the piper, and has, therefore, the right to call the tune. The English government has not paid and does not propose to pay, and its claim to call the tune is therefore much less. Morally the French government has a right--so far at least as the railroad shareholders are concerned--to call on a French company to carry workmen at a loss; morally, in my judgment at least, the English government has no such right. But there is a further objection to the French system; the officers of the French companies have on their own responsibility to form their own decisions, and then the officers of the French government have, also on their own responsibility, to decide whether the decision of the company's officer shall be allowed to take effect or not. The company's officer has the most knowledge and the most interest in deciding rightly, but the government official has the supreme power. The system has worked--largely, I think, because the principal officers of the companies have been trained as government servants in one or other of the great Engineering Corps, des Mines or des Ponts et Chaussées. But it is vicious in principle, and in any case would not bear transplanting. What we need is a system under which the responsibility rests, as at present, with a single man (let us call him the general manager), and he does what he on the whole decides to be best, subject however to this: that if he does what no reasonable man could do, or refuses to do what any reasonable man would do, there shall be a power behind to restrain, or, as the case may be, to compel him. And that power may, I think, safely be simply the Minister--let us call him the President of the Board of Trade. For, be it observed, the question for him is not the exceedingly difficult and complicated question, "What is best to be done?" but the quite simple question, "Is the decision come to which I am asked to reverse so obviously wrong that no reasonable man could honestly make it?"