I am sick of the term "bottleneck." So, I hope,
are a good many other people. But what the term implies can be serious enough. Take railway wagons. How far the recovery of the world is due to shortage in this indispensable form of transport it would be im- possible to compute. The same story comes from nearly every country. With the position at home we are familiar enough ; nothing has been more encouraging than the success of volunteers and others in getting wagons unloaded at week-ends. But we need thousands of new wagons and tens of thousands of old ones repaired, and the works simply can't tackle it. In Germany the situation is far more desperate, and Ruhr coal stocks go on piling up for lack of transport. Austria complains that her wagons are disappearing behind the iron curtain and never coming back. And just the same story comes from Africa. Lord Ashburton has been demonstrating that the ground- nut harvest in Nigeria cannot be shifted for lack of wagons. At the other end of the Continent the chairman of one of the great copper-mine combines explained at the annual meeting that the output would have been substantially greater but for the fact that deliveries of coal from the great Wankie Colliery had been short through lack of wagons. Wankie coal has an indispensable part to play in that development of Southern Rhodesia of which Sir Miles Thomas has been speaking so impressively ; and there are plans in the air for getting some of the coal exported and sold for dollars. But it can't be got to the sea without wagons, and it can't be got to where it is needed inland without wagons. Where are the wagons to come from? No one on earth knows.
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