It may seem a queer question to young people--What would you think, supposing you wanted to go to Chicago on the Canadian National Railways--and, instead of going into the railway office at King and Yonge, and paying, say, sixteen dollars for the ticket, you slipped into a private ticket office up street, and bought your ticket for ten dollars? Or, supposing you were going to San Francisco, instead of buying a through ticket to your destination at the Canadian National or Canadian Pacific office downtown, or at the Union Station, you bought a ticket only for Chicago, at the little office up the street, and then, at Chicago, bought another for the rest of the journey from another privately-conducted office, and saved perhaps twenty-five dollars by doing that, instead of buying your ticket at the railway office in Chicago? In 1924 it sounds very odd to mention such possibilities to men and women of thirty years of age, who suppose they really know something of the world’s ways. But to older people the suggestion has all the familiarity of reminiscence--it recalls the age of scalping in passenger travel, and of the so-called fast freight lines in the other branch of railway business, which were in full blast when I began to audit accounts in the Grand Trunk head office at Point St. Charles. What is now told about our railways is not to their discredit, except so far as it would be to the discredit, for instance, of the Christian churches of to-day to remind them that it was not they who directly raised the tone of political morality, or abolished slavery. Canadian railway practice was like the railway practice of other countries--mainly the United States. The Grand Trunk, with its English management and English ideas, had some peculiarities of its own; but, in the main, its relation to scalping and fast freight lines was forced upon it by the prevailing conditions on this continent. Those conditions could only be finally improved by the intervention of public authority, such as the Dominion Board of Railway Commissioners, or the Inter-State Commerce Commission, both of which bodies may be only stages in the evolution towards the public ownership of all railways, which, theoretically at least (though practically it is not so easy of accomplishment), is as sound as the public ownership of the postoffice, the navy, or the geodetic survey.