The announcement of a 75 per cent. dividend by ,
Vauxhall Motors, after 14 years with no dividend at all, is one of many evidences of the uniform prosperity of the motor-car industry in this country. Cars are being poured out in steadily increasing numbers to run on roads whose capacity to accommodate them hardly changes at all. And since fatalities bear some rough relation (though by no means a precise relation) to the number of cars in action, the prospect of a reduction in road-deaths looks singularly gloomy. If there were ' reason to think we had reached saturation-point in the matter of cars the case would be different, but a glance at the comparative figures for Great Britain and the United States soon dispels any illusion on that point. The latest American statistics I happen to have available are for 1931. In that year close on 26,000,000 cars were licensed. For this country, for 1933, the figure was ' 2,280,000. In America one car to every five of the inhabitants ; here one car to every twenty. Road deaths last week were 160. If we quadruple our car total, to reach America's proportion--?
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