ecided to dispense with Mr. Hood's
services altogether. Mr. Hood was summoned to Crewe, where he had an
interview with the Chairman of the Company, Mr. J. F. Buckley, who was
accompanied by two of his colleagues on the Board,--Mr. Bailey-Hawkins
and Mr. J. W. Maclure, M.P., and Mr. Conacher, the manager, but to a
memorial in favour of the stationmaster's reinstatement, they declined to
accede.

The fat was now in the fire, and a very fierce blaze ensued. It lit up
the industrial world, then struggling into organic solidarity, with lurid
flames, and there were those who had some trading or personal grievance
against the company, who not less eagerly threw on fresh fuel of their
own. Protest meetings were held at Wrexham and Newtown, at which
resolutions were carried condemnatory of "excessive hours," and the late
Mr. A. C. Humphreys-Owen, of Glansevern, though he had not been present
at the Crewe conclave, was, as a director of the Company and a
prospective Parliamentary candidate for the Denbigh Boroughs, singled out
for special attack, and as warmly defended by some of his friends.

Mr. Harford, general secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Railway
Servants of the United Kingdom, with what was, perhaps, an unconscious
gift of prophecy, declared that "little railways were a gigantic mistake,
and the sooner the better they are taken over by some larger concern, for
the workmen and the shareholders." The Labour Press echoed with
resounding phrases about "Cambrian tyranny," and "victimisation," and Mr.
Hood was acclaimed a martyr of overbearing officialism.

More serious was the attitude and the action of Parliament. The House of
Commons, ever quick to resent any appearance of tampering with its
"privileges," were sensitive to the suggestion of what seemed to them
some interference with a witness before their Select Committee, and not
long after the new Session opened, in 1892, Mr. Conacher, who had,
meanwhile, left the Cambrian, to the regret of the Board and many others,
to assume the larger responsibility of management of the North British
Railway Co., was summoned from Edinburgh to appear, with Mr. Buckley and
Mr. Bailey-Hawkins, at the Bar of the House to receive the admonition of
Mr. Speaker Peel. Mr. (afterwards Sir John) Maclure, being a Member of
the House, was at the same time required to stand in his place, where,
with bowed head, that burly and genial gentleman, looked very like a
schoolboy listening