The plan is almost perfectly regional. The only important exceptions are where a long arm of the Paris-Orleans goes at right angles to the parent stem and up into the heart of the Etat territory (to Nantes and to Brest), and where the Etat in turn has a rather roundabout line from Paris to Bordeaux, the chief external point of the Orleans system. (It is possible that in the contemplated return of the Etat to private operation this line may be handed over to the Paris-Orleans. It would be a logical step in the French regional plan.) Still one almost always goes to Nantes upon the P.-O. and rarely ever to Bordeaux upon the Etat, while to Marseilles or to Lyons there is absolutely no alternative to the P.-L.-M. To go to Rheims or to Strasbourg one must use the Est, to Boulogne or to Calais the Nord. There is no choice other than the Etat for reaching Rouen or Le Havre from Paris.
Here then is regional railway operation brought to almost perfect operation, with competition all but eliminated. For remember, if you please, that it never is completely eliminated. Even if one were to go to the final degree of consolidation and centralization, competition would not be entirely gone. In France, even if the Paris-Orleans no longer reached Nantes or the Etat Bordeaux, even if every mile of rail were brought under a single autocratic and absolute head, there would remain the competition of her unified railway with those outside the republic, and within it the natural competition, let us say, of towns north of Paris with towns south for the traffic of that metropolis; east would forever be pitted against west. You can no more entirely remove competition in business than you can the risings and the settings of the great sun. But you can remove the absurd phases, the obvious extravagances of competition--particularly in transport. Remember always, if you will--I purposely reiterate the point--that some fine day you can cease to regard the motor-truck, the inland waterway barge, the interurban trolley, and the steam railroad train as competitors, but rather in the proper sense, each as agents of that great function of life, transportation, and so in some time or place properly correlated. And you can begin by regarding the railroads together as at least a single efficient one of these agents, and not as a lot of quarreling small boys dissipating much of their energy through their trivial disputes. This is the lesson that the railways of France bring to the rest of the great world of transport.