Pratt
says this letter was quoted in the Report which the Board of Trade made
to Parliament after their 85 days' Inquiry. The railway companies
announced that the new rates were in no sense final, that the time
allowed them was insufficient for proper revision, that they would give
an assurance that no increase would be made that would interfere with
trade or agriculture or diminish traffic and that, unless under
exceptional circumstances, no increase would in any case exceed 5 per
cent. But all was in vain, and Parliament passed an Act which provided
that any increase whatever (though within the limits of the new statutory
maximum) if complained of, should be heard and decided upon by the
Railway Commissioners, and that the onus of proving the reasonableness of
the increase should rest on the railway company. Sir Alexander (then
Mr.) Butterworth, in his book on _The Law Relating to Maximum Rates and
Charges on Railways_, published in 1897, says this remarkable result is
presented: that Parliament, "after probably the most protracted inquiry
ever held in connection with proposed legislation, decided that certain
amounts were to be the charges which railway companies should for the
future be entitled to make, and in 1894 apparently accepted the
suggestion that many of the charges, sanctioned after so much
deliberation, were unreasonable, and enacted that to entitle a company to
demand them, it should not be sufficient that the charge was within any
limit fixed by an Act of Parliament.
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