COUNTING THE COST

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 7302, 5 December 1910, Page 2

COUNTING THE COST

FIIOII OUE SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT, ~ LONDON, October 21. Brief as was the' duration , of • the -French railway strike, .France lias suffered enormous Josses through it. For a bare week’s confusion and riot the country has to-foot a very big bill indeed. Arem-alo figures are, of course, impossible,, but it is computed by the officials of the Ministry of. Finance that the cost of the strike cannot be placed at less than ten to twelve millions sterling. The value of goods “hung up” during the strike between'France and England alone, was nearly a, couple of million pounds'., A very fair proportion of these goods were, foodstuffs and other perishable articles, the value of which is irretrievably lost. A similar state of affairs, of course,, existed in the interchange of goods between Franco arid her Continental neighbours, . Belgium, Holland, Germany and other countries. The French railway lines .themselves lost a million and a quarter in passenger fares, and ■on goods freightage, and will bo put/ to great expense to repair the damage done by the strikers; who themselves have lost quite A'500,000 in wages. The effect of the interruption of the international trains hit manufacturing and retail- men very severely. Falls houses where stocks were low were unable to fulfil orders. All industries have lost tremendously. So in a smaller way the losses liave filtered down until the smal-. lest dealer has, suffered. . As .au instance of how , a ; strike can affect every class of, a community, the ‘women'of the flower kiosks on- the boulevards whose takings average Jll a day, have, for want Of good flowers, sold only ss' or 6s wortli. '. “The strikers,, with their senseless attacks on property, have run up a bill amounting to hundreds of: thousands, while the loss to the, small farmers and small shopkeepers all over France is vast. It is. impossible to obtain some idea of how they have suffered from the market reports in the', ’‘Bulletin des Halles” which are published daily. The foodstuffs received in the Pans markets alone were reduced by half during the days of the strike. . Even the fishing villages remote from Paris felt the effects of'the strike sororeiv, their aggregate losses being estimated at over , haft a million pounds.