A NATIONALISATION FAILURE.

Hokitika Guardian, 8 May 1920, Page 4

A NATIONALISATION FAILURE.

AMERICA'S GIIEAT EXPERIMENT.

(By F. A. McKenzie, the Well-known Writer who has recently rotuined from the United States).

America lias this week closed down a great experiment in nationalisation. On

January 1, 1918, the Government, as a matter of war policy, took over entire control of tlio railways in the United States, a quarter of a million miles, employing close on two million men. On Monday last it Handed the lines hack to the private companies after having incurred a loss, over the greater part of that period, averaging C 500,000 a day.

It is difficult to obtain a really impar-

tial opinion on the experiment even in i America itself, for everyone, outside the • railway workers, is so violently preju- ; diced against it that the inquirer is , hound to some extent to be affected.

Even the ohief administrators in Wash-

! ington, when I questioned them, adJ mitted their anxiety to restore the lines ! to private ownership. Many shortcomings under Government were due not to : administrative faults, but to the wai | ail'd to social unrest. They would have i happened whether the lines were owned

by the State or private individuals. Yet there Was grievous public disappointment.

The railways were in a bad way when the Government took them over. They had lor some time been starved owing to forced low charges. Many lines had run down in equipment. Fresh capital was not coming in. They wore unable to handle the great masses of eastward traffic required by the war. Many reforms and economies were promised as a result of Government administration. The extravagant waste of competing services over similar routes was to be stopped. Rival ticket offices were closed; advertising was reduced. Traffic was to be so arranged that it would go by the shortest route whatever lines it passed over. There was a great hurrah about the saving to be effected by cutting off the salaries of a few highly paid railway presidents, some of them receiving as much as £20,000 a year. A million pounds was to be cut off by reducing the men at the toil. WAGES, AND FREIGHTS.

But there soon came a demand which swallowed such saving a hundredfold. The railroad men asked for higher money and obtained it. They were not satisfied with that. Finding the Government amenable to pressure they put forward demand after demand. An eight hours day was established. A hundred thousand extra men were wanted to do the same work. There were probably more railroad strikes under the Government than under private ownership. By January 1919 wages and salaries had risen on the average all round 52 per cent. Soon this was up to 70 pci- cent, and finally it rose till it was iiearly-100 per cent.

This rise was no greater than in other industries, if as much, but it played havoc with railway finances. The old gibe that “The man who minds the train is paid more tlun the man who trains the mind” became ludicrously inadequate. One heard of certain railway mechanics making about £I,OOO a year. A speaker at one public gathering pointed out that first-class locomotive drivers were paid more than the Governors of thirteen States. “Why not?” asked somebody in the audience. The railway administration attempted to meet the new charges by steep rises in freight and passenger rates—-rises that the private companies had not been allowed to make.

There was still a big and growing deficit, and Mr Hines, the Director-Gen-eral, went to Congress in June last with a demand for over 200 million pounds to run the railways until the end of the year. Congress gave him 200 million pounds.. This sum was not all loss; a considerable amount, of it was to be spent on improvements and extensions that would •have to bo paid for by the companies when they took their lines back again. The Government had guaranteed the companies certain returns on the basis of what they had formerly done. It had to pay hundreds, of millions of dollars t-o make up the deficiency. The Director-General was so desperately short of money, in spite of his Government grant of 200 millions and the '-greatly increased cnarges, that- he scarcely knew how to turn to pay his way. bad discipline.

What the public mainly complained about, however, was not the high charges, but bad service. Immediately tlie railways were taken over by the Government, employees of all kinds, from the Negro porters to the ticket punchers, seemed to think that now was their opportunity to slack off, to put on airs and to give the public the barest possible civility. All the side attractions which once made American railway travelling nearly the most delightful in the world seemed to dwindle away. The dining-car services becamo standardised down to a low and costly level.

One night Inst autumn, travelling from Washington to New York, where one is supposed to have a particularly luxurious service, I was awakened by a steady current of air blowing on me as 1 lay in my sleeper. I felt to see if the window was open, but it was not. Still the current continued. I switched on the light, felt around and found that some previous passenger had cut a triangle out of the middle of the metal side of the car. The porters and cleaners had never noticed it. This sort of thing would have been impossible with i the worst private company. The Government service showed, too, a surprising lack of vision. It required all the energies of the. great staff to I keep, routine work running at a minimum. The railways in America, despite their faults, had been in the past pioneers, organisers, the openers up of fresh regions. All this kind of work now seemed to cease. The railway men liked national operation because it gave them more money and more independence; but they were not satisfied. They put forward a plan last year, the famous Plum plan, by which the railways were to he handed over to them altogether, under lease, the State bearing the loss, if there was a loss, and they sharing the profits. The one great thing that can be claimed for the national administration of the lilies is that it helped at one of the most critical periods of the war. When in the dark days of 1918 the British and French Ambassadors went to President Wilson with messages from their Governments that American troops must be | sent to Europe in large numbers if the war was to be won, President Wilson gave the word: everything else was swept on one side; and troops wore despatched to the coast in such numbers \ and in such short time that the transports were unable to handle them. Nationalisation in America has not had a fair trial. The past twenty months must be taken as a time of experiment. But they have certainly produced a deep feeling among all classes outside the raihvaymen themselves that nationalisation is not want-

ec]. They have shown, too, that the Government regulation of railways : years before the war was harsh, unrea-' ( sonable, and unjust. The railways will t start, their private ownership under

bottei’ conditions now. Had they not done so-it would have been impossible for them to hope to carry on." with hoots full of water, and they drank fain with, thoir tea and'ate mud with their “bully,” and endured it all with the. philosophy of “grin and bear it I” and laughter, as I heard them laughing in those places botween explosive curses. Most of thq men became fatalists, with odd suporstitions in the place of faith. “It’s no good worrying,” they said. “If your name is written on a German shell you can’t escape it, and if it isn’t written, nothing can touch you.”

At the Soipmo it seemed at first that so much heroic effort had ended in failure:

V-ictory? . . . Well, wo had gained some ground and many prisoners, and here and there some guns. But as I stood by Montauban I saw that outline was a sharp salient looped round Mametz village and then dipping sharply southwards to Fricourt. . . . Oh, God! had wo only made another salient after all that monstrous effort? . Failure on failure. The first use of tanks, from which so much had been hoped, this, too, failed. I The troops, who had been buoyed up I with the hope that at last the machine gun evil was going to be scotched, were disillusioned and dejected when they saw tanks ditched behind the lines or nowhere in sight when once again they had to trudge forward under the flail of machine gun bullets from earthwork redoubts. It was a failure in generalship to give away our secret before it could be made effective. Yet there were some prophets who saw that this failure was not final or hopeless, and that where tanks failed in ! fives or tens tanks in hundreds®' would prevail. j WHAT THE MEN THOUGHT. | The climax of the agony of our armies i seemed to have arrived when after J months of heartbreaking effort, just as 1 the German front was cracking on the . Sonane: I At the very time when the moral of the German soldier was lowest and when | the strain on tile High Command was greatest, the weather turned in their i favour and gave them just the breathing space they desperately needed/ The ground became a quagmire. Yet more terrible even than the prolonged and bloody buttles of the Somme were the 1917 battles about Ypres.

The losses in many of these battles amounted almost to annihilation to many battalions, and whole divisions lost as much as 50 per cent of their strength after a few days in action. Napoleon said that no body of men could lose more than 25 per cent of their fighting strength in an action without being broken in spirit. Our men lost double that and more than double, but kept their courage, though in some cases they lost their hope.

In these men of the Fifth Army there was

A general opinion that they had been the victims of atrocious staff work, tragic in its consequences. From what f saw of some of the Fifth Army Staff officers I was of the same opinion. If they had wisdom it was deeply camouflaged by an air of inefficiency. General Gough was badly served by his subordinates.

Generally the men in the trenches and flic officers too regarded the staff and the “brass hats” with dislike. G.H.Q., said one officer who -had fought since 1914, laved in a world of its own, rosecoloured, remote from the ugly things of war. Occasionally they visited the trenches as society folk go. slumming, and came back proud of having seen a shell burst, having braved the lice and dirt.

The closing pages of the book warn us that we are “racing to the rocks,” marching to anarchy if wo do not reform, and that “it will go hard with the Government of England” if it establishes a “new Imperialism upheld by the power of guns.”