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1901. NEW ZEALAND.

RAILWAYS COMMITTEE. REPORT ON THE PETITION OF SAMUEL VAILE, TOGETHER WITH COPY OF PETITION, MINUTES OF EVIDENCE, AND APPENDIX.

Report brought up 30th October, 1901, and ordered to be printed.

ORDER OF REFERENCE. Extract from the Journals of the House of Representatives. Wednesday, the 3bd Day op July, 1901. Ordered, " That a Committee be appointed, consisting of ten members, to examine into and report upon questions relating to the railways, with power to call for persons and papers, three to be a the Committee to consist of Mr. Flatman, Mr. Lawry, Mr. Massey, Mr. Morrison, Mr. McGuire, Mr. R. McKenzie, Mr. G. W. Russell, Mr. Tanner, Mr. J. W. Thomson, and the mover."—(Hon. Sir J. G. Ward.)

PETITION.

To the Honourable the Speaker and Members of the House of Eepresentatives of the Colony of New Zealand in Parliament assembled. The petition of the undersigned Samuel Vaile, of the City of Auckland, in the Colony of New Zealand, humbly sheweth :— 1. That an impression prevails that it is the intention of the Government to make serious alterations in the method of administering the railways of the colony. 2. That for the last nineteen years your petitioner has made a careful study of the railway problem, and is the inventor of the stage system of railway administration. 3. That adaptations of this system, under the name of the " zone system," have for many years past been working in Hungary, Austria, Eussia (including Siberia), Prussia, and some other countries, and have invariably given satisfactory financial results. i. That in the countries mentioned, owing to the arrangement of the stages or zones having tended to attract the population to the great cities, the general social result, as your petitioner anticipated, have not been as satisfactory as the financial results. 5. That the concentration of population curtails transit traffic by destroying the smaller trading centres, and thus decreasing the number of points to which people and goods require to be carried. 6. That the recent census proves that this process is going on here, and that many of our smaller towns are losing their population. 7. That the main object of the stage system as laid down by your petitioner is to do away with this evil, to promote settlement in the country, distribute population, and so not only produce better social results, but also an increasing and permanent railway revenue, which must result if more trading centres are created by giving thinly populated districts temporary, but not permanent, protection. 8. That your petitioner's study of the railway question enables him to state with certainty that any system of through rates that does not take the location of population into account, and fix the charges accordingly, must ultimately produce bad results by concentrating population at the points those through rates protect.

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