Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: and to stand still is a limitation of the normal current of affairs. For price to maintain even a steady level, if expansion of traffice means economies of operation, is to limit the normal expansion of the traffic. That there is this correlation between price and the amount of business transacted is admitted by economists. But so little emphasis has been laid upon the fact that, in the railway field, even in the absence of actual falling-off of business, too high rates may mean limitation of traffic, that we cannot forbear citing two very striking examples of a tremendous increase of the traffic effected by a sudden reduction of rates. In each case the reduction of rates was so sudden as to preclude the possibility of the expansion being due to other causes, and in the latter case the expansion has gone forward even in the face of depression in other fields of business. Reference is made to the classic story of the expansion of the post-office business in Great Britain resultant upon Hill's reform in rates; and to the recent case in the United States of a tremendous expansion of the carriage of parcels which took place with the reduction of rates at the time of the introduction of the parcel post. Hill's reform has now so far passed into history that we dare make only brief reference to it. Suffice it to say that Hill, a postal clerk, conceived the idea that if the price of postage were reduced to one penny from what averaged at least a shilling, the amount of mail matter offered at this lower rate would be so increased that the postal receipts would be fully as large as before the reduction in price. Hill's expectations were not immediately fulfilled, but after a few years the postal business did sufficiently increase as the result of this reform fully to justify even such...