munication, and compare it with the economy effected in these days through the instrumentality and speed of railways in the conveyance of goods. A greater fallacy never existed than the supposition that money laid out in railways is so much fixed capital locked up and lost to the trade of the country. We have £96,000,000 already expended in railways. I believe the gross returns of profit amount to eight millions a-year. Of this £5,000,000 is derived from passengers' traffic, and £3,000,000 from goods' traffic. But we have only to look at the ancient charges to find, that over and above the time saved, the cost of passenger-travelling has been reduced at least to onethird, while the carriage of goods, as compared with canal conveyance, has been reduced to one-half. Thus the goods' and passengers' traffic, to which I have referred as having been carried by railroad, at the former rates of land and water carriage, would have come to £21,000,000 instead of £8,000,000 in the last year; and the public gains the difference between these two sums. That proposition no man I think can deny; and as regards the public and the money market, instead of floating capital to the amount of £96,000,000 being converted into lockedup capital, no less than £13,000,000 a-year is economised, which reckoning it at 5 per cent. represents £260,000,000. So that far from losing, the public

are absolute gainers of £260,000,000 in the economy of the inland traffic and carrying-trade of the country."

Perhaps the advantages which a community gains by railroads in the saving of their time and money were never illustrated in a more striking manner than by the picture which he presented of their consequences in these respects on the life of an active public servant.

Mr. Robert Weale was twelve years employed as an assistant poor-law commissioner, during which time he travelled in the public service ninety-nine thousand six hundred and seven miles. Sixty-nine thousand of these miles were travelled by the old conveyance, and thirty thousand by railway. By the old mode the cost of travelling was 1s. 6d. per mile, and by railway it was only 34d.; so that virtually the country saved by the new mode of conveyance five-sixths of the cost of travelling. But the saving of time was still more remarkable. If the whole distance had been performed by railway it would have occupied one year, thirty weeks, and six days; if the whole had been performed by the superseded method it would have occupied four years, thirty-nine weeks, and one day. The result is that three years and nine weeks of Mr. Weale's life would have been saved, while the advantage to the public

would have been that the whole cost would only have been £1344, instead of £7735. So that this active public servant would have saved three years and a half of his life, and the country £5390 in his travelling expences alone.

The bill was read a second time, at one o'clock, by a very large majority.

CHAPTER XXI.

WHATEVER may have been the cause of the monetary malady of 1847, one thing is evident, that it was not anticipated by those who would be deemed most competent to form an accurate judgment on such a topic. The ministers themselves were clearly taken by surprise; indeed, with a commendable ingenuousness, they omitted no opportunity of impressing upon the country their astonishment and perplexity. It was clearly with them a state of things which ought not to have occurred, and which must be transient. Never, according to ministers, was trade in a sounder state; commerce legitimate, speculation dormant, stocks low. The disasters terminated by a committee of inquiry into the causes of commercial distress, moved for by the chancellor of the exchequer, who himself drew the report of the committee which represented to the house that one

of the causes of this distress was reckless commercial

speculation.

On the 1st of March (1847), the government raising a loan of eight millions to meet their Irish expenditure, the contractors of the loan proposed to discount their instalments which would have immediately placed the exchequer in the possession of ample funds; the ministry confident in their resources rejected at once the proposition. On the 7th of May, the chancellor of the exchequer with an empty treasury had to appeal to parliament for an act to authorise an advance of interest by way of discount for prompt payments on the loan, which he had ultimately to receive on much less advantageous terms than those rejected two months previously.

On the 30th of April when proposing the vote of money for the construction of Irish railways the chancellor of the exchequer alluded to "the panic and alarm which had prevailed for some days past in the city, and also in several parts of the country," and which he gave it as his opinion to be "utterly and altogether without foundation." He said also on that occasion, "it is clear that the effort which the bank of England thought it necessary to make has been made. It is now over." It is now over." Little more than a week after he was himself in a state of "panic and alarm" in the house of commons, proposing for the second time in the course of the session to raise the