given. Now the ordinary profits of commerce have usually been estimated under the lowest of these rates; and it is therefore evident that they cannot support an amount of interest at all approaching to 10 per cent. The country could not supply capital in sufficient amount for the wants of the Railways, and the wants of trade and manufactures; and the consequence was-that terrific pressure on the money market, which far exceeded in severity anything before experienced in this country. In ordinary circumstances, when profits fall, the rate of interest also falls; but the Railway demand was altogether exceptional, and trade and industry could not carry on the struggle with it. The result is yet fresh in our recollections. Whole classes have been, as it were, decimated. Mercantile houses, ranking

high in general estimation, and hitherto supposed, whatsoever the reality, to be possessed of immense resources, fell, one after another, in such numbers, that universal distrust began to pervade the commercial world, and credit was almost annihilated. Monied men asked themselves, where is all this to stop? Their faculties were, as it were, paralyzed with apprehension; and even now many hardly dare trust themselves with reflection on the scenes through which they passed.

It appears to me that a time like the present, in which the wrecks of so many once-proud establishments floating around us bear testimony to the magnitude of the evils resulting from inordinate Railway speculation, and arraign so forcibly the defective legislation in which they have. their source, is peculiarly appropriate for an inquiry into the whole subject. The past is of course beyond remedy; but as a continuance of the same causes

will naturally produce the same effects, if suffered to run their course unchecked and uncontrolled, it becomes of paramount importance that we should endeavour to discover and adopt means for ensuring our future safety.

The Railway world have suffered largely from the distress which they were so instrumental in inflicting on others. No description of property has felt more the derangement of the money-market than Railway Shares. Indeed, circumstances peculiar to them, to which I shall hereafter advert, created a distress in the share-market before property in general felt any material depreciation; and now that money can be readily obtained at low rates, by persons of good credit and available resources, Railway Shares still remain in an extreme state of depression. A strong suspicion exists that the accounts of many Companies have been framed with a view to purposes of deception; that, to swell the amount of apparent profits, charges which ought to have been placed against receipts have been paid out of capital; and from the loose way in which the accounts of many Boards of Directors are kept, the mystery in which they wrap their affairs, and the want of an efficient audit, a justification is afforded for distrust. It has been publicly affirmed, that many Companies have been paying dividends more or less out of capital; and that some which have received credit for yielding a tolerable per centage, have been enabled to do so by their capital alone. Besides this cause of distrust, the immensity of the engagements into which many of the Lines have entered; the belief that the profits on old Lines will be swallowed up in a great

measure by Branches of a less productive description, which in their eagerness to distance rivals, or to exclude the public from low fares, the old Companies grasped with so much avidity; the inability to pay a series of calls for works which must be completed before they can be productive, and which, at the same time, gluts the market with shares,-all conspire to depreciate Railway property. The crooked policy, too, of many Boards of Directors, who, during the palmy days of Railway speculation, engrossed Line after Line, and amalgamated right and left, guaranteeing large dividends where little or no profit had ever been realized, thus enabling parties in the secret to buy up beforehand discredited stock, which they sold in a month or two, sometimes at a profit of cent. per cent., and often much more, tells now with fearful effect on the holders of shares.

There was a time when some excuse might have been offered for the defective legislation with regard to Railways. -When the gentlemen who projected the Liverpool and Manchester Line first applied for their Act, few persons believed that the enterprise would either be practicable or profitable; and it was hardly astonishing that under such circumstances, no adequate protection for the public should have been thought of. But when the Line was fairly opened in 1830, and its success left it no longer doubtful that Railways would afford a beneficial investment for capital, the eyes of parliament should have been opened to the importance of the invention, and the influence it was likely to have on the interests of the country. Any man possessed of ordinary powers of obser

vation and reflection must then have discovered that Railways would soon supersede all other means of communication. Their superiority in point of speed and facility. was so manifest that parliament ought instantly to have secured the community whatever benefit was derivable from them, without discouraging enterprise. But, year after year, parliament pursued the same heedless course -the lessons of experience were lost on it. On the 17th of May, 1836, in my place in the House of Commons, I endeavoured to draw attention to the evils of the course we had been pursuing. On moving a resolution,-"That in all Railway Bills, it be made a condition, with a view to the protection of the public interests, that the dividends be limited to a certain rate ;* and that parliament should reserve to itself the power of fixing periodically the tolls chargeable on passengers and goods," I attempted to impress the House with a due sense of the importance and magnitude of the interests involved in the change which was likely, "at no distant period, to transfer our chief public conveyances from the king's highways to a number of Joint-stock Railway Companies." I remarked that legitimate speculation, where there was a probability of a reasonable return, would not be checked by such legislative restrictions as the public interests required; and I pointed out the circumstances which rendered it peculiarly necessary in the case of Railways, to protect the public interests; observing that "if any improvement took place which tended to lower the cost, or to accelerate the speed

* The dividends had from the first been limited to 10 per cent., but the Companies were suffered to act as if subject to no limitation.

of our accustomed public conveyances, the public immediately had the full benefit of it; but in the numberless Acts now before the House, no security is taken that the public should have the benefit of any improvement in Railways."

At that time some of the greatest Railways in the kingdom had only been commenced. The Great Western had obtained their first Act in 1835, and twenty-three miles of their Line were opened on the 4th June, 1838. The London and Birmingham Company was earlier in the field. Its Act of Incorporation dates from 1833; but, although partially opened before, the whole of the Line to Birmingham was not completed till 1839. Long posterior, however, to the date of this motion, (17th of May, 1836,) the various Companies had to apply to parliament for fresh powers to enable them to proceed with their undertakings; and it was still time to have repaired any oversight that might have been committed in first dealing with these bodies. "If the public," I observed, "do not reap from the Railways all the advantages it is entitled to, the fault will be laid, and justly so, at our door. It is our duty to give every fair encouragement to the enterprise of individuals and of associations, but we are at the same time bound to take care that we do not confer rights and privileges on any individual, or set of individuals, which may be employed to the public detriment, or which may hinder the public from hereafter reaping advantages they would have enjoyed, but for the existence of such rights and immunities."

When once the conveyances of the highway are superseded, the public are entirely at the mercy of the Rail