to which no
parallel is to be found in the history of mercantile enterprise.
Keeping out of view entirely the large sums which were recklessly
squandered during the railway mania in mere gambling transactions
and bubble schemes, there has been actually sunk in the construction
and working of lines up to the present time more than L.200,000,000
sterling. Before railways were called into existence, by far the
larger portion of this enormous capital was divided into a great
number of comparatively small sums, invested in a corresponding
number of different speculations. From causes which it would be
easy, but foreign to our present purpose, to explain, the profits
arising from these various speculations were not only in the
aggregate larger than those hitherto derived from railways, but the
former speculations or investments being more temporary and
convertible in their nature, secured to the parties engaging in them
a far greater command over the capital employed in them. By
diverting, as the railway system has done, so much money from the
ordinary channels of mercantile enterprise, in which large profits
were made, and--what is of more importance to the present
remarks--when that money was well within the command and subject to
the recall of its owners; and by taking, so to speak, and locking it
up in a repository which could not be opened, the circulating medium
of exchange soon became a scarce commodity to those who but lately
had possessed it in abundance.

But it would be very false to infer because extensive bankruptcies,
and periods of severe pecuniary embarrassment, have accompanied, if
not indeed been caused by the development of the railway system,
that therefore that system must be an unsound and unremunerative
one. These monetary difficulties were in a great measure the
consequence of over-speculation, and therefore form no sounder
evidence against the utility of railways, than does over-speculation
in tea condemn the prudent employment of capital in the tea-trade.
Besides which, it must ever be remembered that the judiciousness of
an undertaking is not always to be judged of by its immediate
results. All investments of capital which are from their nature
permanent, require time for the development of their effects, and
may, as regards many of their immediate results, prove rather
injurious than beneficial. To this class of speculations railways
belong. Introduced for the purpose of facilitating locomotion,