(4) The danger that interested parties would, by political pressure, compel the State to expend public money on unremunerative lines and unremunerative services. (5) The contraction of the available field for private enterprise, and hence the weakening of the foundation of all individual and national progress. (6) The introduction of serious dangers in connection with labor disputes between the Government and the large body of railway servants. The subject has not been sufficiently long under public discussion to make it easy to state fully the hopes of its supporters and the fears of its opponents. Probably both are exaggerated. If one examines the complaints made against the existing railway system, it is obvious that many of these must exist under any system, whilst some are the necessary accompaniments of every system into which competition enters. But if competition is discarded in favor of monopoly it does not need argument to show that this merely means a change from the evils of competition to the evils of monopoly. No one would deny that each system contains inherent and characteristic evils. The evil of competition is waste; the evils of monopoly are stagnation and the restriction of freedom. Hitherto, for the regulation of railways, reliance has been placed on two factors--competition and control. Parliamentary action and public opinion have veered about from one to the other, and the absence of clear principle in the policy of the Legislature has introduced evils which a more logical and consistent adherence either to the policy of free competition on the one hand, or to the policy of strict control on the other, would have avoided. That some regulation is necessary all would admit. Railways sell transportation as a commodity, but the nature of the business makes it impossible to secure the conditions of absolutely free competition as in the case of other industries. Hence the necessity for control, but every plan of control that has been tried has proved practically inoperative and ineffective mainly because it has endeavored to leave competition in operation, and it is the evils which necessarily arise from competition which lead to most of the complaints against railways. The inevitable weakness of the dual system of competition and control is that control checks competition just where it would be useful in the public interest, and competition nullifies control just where it could be advantageously applied.