IS IT STILL THE HUB?

Boston's port, according to the Herald, is "lapsing into a condition of innocuous desuetude." And Professor Ripley, in urging the rehabilitation of New England railroads, says: "This must take place through a mustering of all the financial resources of the region, public as well as private, if necessary. The industrial preservation of New England demands it. The present plight is avowedly critical."

The difficulties, though they may appear complicated, are clear in their fundamentals to any layman. Prominent authorities are proposing two points of attack: elimination of the differential, and consolidation of the railroad lines. The former is a matter of freight rates on railroads entering Boston as compared to those entering other ports. Under the differential, Boston's rates are fixed considerably higher than those of Philadelphia and Baltimore. When the differential was inaugurated, it was counteracted by a sea differential making ocean rates from Boston correspondingly less. Now the latter has been removed, and the rate from all American ports to foreign ports made the same. Therefore the cost of exporting through Boston is higher, and the inevitable result is a diverting of export commerce from Boston to the other ports. With the decline of exports must come a similar decline in imports. Hence comes a slackening in railroad traffic and a handicap on the New England lines. There is no argument in favor of the differential except the selfish desires of Baltimore and Philadelphia. Evidently the Interstate Commerce Commission is in need of an awakening.

The second solution, a proposal to combine certain New England railroads, has received most attention from the press and from transportation authorities, notably Professor Ripley of the University. That some such consolidation must take place, is regarded as inevitable if the New England lines are to survive. Professor Ripley's plan calls for a grouping of unified lines, gaining new strength from the combination, with the necessary competition maintained by leaving the Boston and Albany and the Grand Trunk systems in their present status. Perhaps the most interesting feature of the scheme is the proposal that the state governments have a part-control in the new systems; it has even been suggested that the states assume full financial responsibility.

Consolidation, no doubt, is the eventual solution. Contrary to the beliefs of many, the war proved that a certain amount of unified control was beneficial to the railroads. But more fundamental than any plan of reorganization, and a necessary preliminary to such a plan, is an adjustment of the rate difficulty. As long as Boston's port is stagnant, a large source of business for New England's railroads remains unproductive. It has been pointed out especially that Boston is the natural outlet for a large share of the Canadian trade. But this trade, as well as most of that from other sources, is being diverted from Boston on account of the differential. Until that ini uitous discrimination is removed, Boston cannot resume its rank of a great seaport, and the New England railroads cannot muster the strength they need to put them on a sound financial basis.