Railways and the State 273 



" to facilitate the abandonment of railways and the dissolu- 

 tion of railway companies." Of the 8592 miles of railway 

 sanctioned in the three Sessions, 1845-7, no fewer than 1560 

 miles were (as shown by the Report of the Royal Commission 

 on Railways, 1867), abandoned by the promoters under the 

 authority of the Act ; while a further 2000 miles of railway, 

 requiring 40 millions of capital, are said by the Report of the 

 1853 Committee to have been abandoned without the consent 

 of Parliament. 



To the extent indicated by these abandonments the rail- 

 way situation was certainly relieved. But the mania and 

 the resultant panic had serious consequences in regard not 

 alone to investors in the schemes that failed but also to the 

 companies that survived. 



Apart from projects designed to open up entirely new 

 districts many of them of a perfectly genuine and desirable 

 character there were others directly devised to compete 

 with existing lines and capture some of the remunerative 

 traffic these were then handling ; and it was, as I have shown, 

 quite in accordance with the accepted principle of State 

 railway-policy that such competition should be encouraged, 

 in preference to any " districting " of the country among 

 particular companies or to the creation or co-ordination of 

 an organised system of railways on the lines proposed by 

 Mr Gladstone's Committee. 



The existing companies, rinding that the territory already 

 " allotted " to them (as they considered) was being invaded, 

 or was in danger of being invaded, felt themselves forced, for 

 the purposes of self-defence, to enter on a number of pro- 

 tective schemes which might not, at the time, otherwise 

 have been warranted. Clifford says on this point in his 

 " History of Private Bill Legislation " : "As the Govern- 

 ment took no steps to prevent the promotion of competitive 

 railways, tending to diminish the profits of existing companies, 

 the latter sought to protect themselves as they best could, 

 and justified their many unprofitable extensions and amalga- 

 mations as measures forced upon them by the leave-alone 

 policy of the Government." 



Confirmation of this statement will be found in a speech 

 delivered on February 23, 1848, by Mr C. Russell, M.P., 

 chairman of the Great Western Railway Company, at the 



