THE IMPORTANCE OF SPEED TO COMMERCE.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—Being away from home, I have only just received my Spectator of November 3rd, and seen the letter from "A Tradesman," following up your most opportune article with the above title. If I were at home, I could send you an exact list which I have been compiling for some time with dates of despatch and receipt of packages conveyed by goods train, illustrating what " Tradesman " says, and showing that the railway companies of to-day, so far as the matter of speed in the transit of medium-sized consignments of merchandise is concerned, cannot show a better performance than the old-time "fish-waggons," and other primitive modes of conveyance that our fathers and grandfathers used to tell us about. When asked to send goods to a distant town to arrive by a specified date, we never dare estimate a greater rate than twenty miles a day, and the speed attained is often very much less. (Let it be understood that I am writing of packages of a few hundredweights, called by the railway companies "smalls"; truckloads go very much quicker.) It so happens that there arrives amongst my letters from home this morning (November 9th) a case in point, in the shape of a complaint—a specimen, I imagine, of what every mer- chant and manufacturer in the country must be con- stantly receiving—from a customer in Dundee that his goods, sent off on October 24th, had not arrived on Novem- ber 7th. Now, granting that the packages do actually arrive on the 7th, here we have a journey of some two hundred and twenty miles that takes the great railway companies of the North fourteen days to accomplish, or at the alarming rate of sixteen miles or less per diem.—I am, Sir, Ste.,
MANUFACTURER.
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