y drawn attention for
an instant to the errors of the past in order to draw a warning for
the future. It must ever be lamented that the introduction of so
stupendous and useful a thing as locomotion by rail, should have
become the occasion of such widespread cupidity and folly; for
scarcely ever had science offered a more gracious boon to mankind. It
is charitable to think that the foundation of the great error that was
committed, lay in a miscalculation as to the relation between
expenditure and returns. We can suppose that there was a certain faith
in the potency of money. To spend so much, was to bring back so much;
and it became an agreeable delusion, that the more was spent, the
greater was to be the revenue. Unfortunately, it does not seem to have
occurred to any one of the parties concerned, that all depends on how
money is spent. There are tradesmen, we imagine, who know to their
cost, that it is quite within the bounds of possibility to have the
whole of their profits swept away by rent and taxes. Curious, that
this plain and unpleasant and very possible result did not dawn on the
minds of the great railway interests. And yet, how grave and
calculating the mighty dons of the new system of locomotion--men who
passed themselves off as up to anything!

Wonderfully acute secretaries; highly-polished chairmen; directors
disdainful of ordinary ways of transacting business. A mystery made of
the most common-place affairs! We may be thankful that the world has
at last seen through these pretenders to superhuman sagacity. With but
remarkably few exceptions, the great railway men of the time have
committed the grossest blunders; and the stupidest blunder of all, has
been the confounding of proper and improper expenditure; just as if a
shopkeeper were to fall into the unhappy error of imagining that his
returns were to be in the ratio, not of the business he was to do, but
of his private and unauthorised expenses.

The instructive fact gathered from railway experience is, that there
is an expenditure which _pays_, and an expenditure that is totally
wasteful. Directors have made the discovery, that costly litigation,
costly and fine stations, fine porticos and pillars, fine bridges, and
finery in various other things, contribute really nothing to returns,
but, on the contrary, hang a dead weight on the concern. No doubt,
fine architecture is a good and proper thing in itself; but a railway
company is not instituted for t