Railways and the State 275 



18,000,000. The following are typical examples of the falls 

 experienced : 



COMPANY. SHARES. JULY, 1845. AfRIL 4, 1848. DECLINE. 







London and Birmingham 100 243 126 117 



Great Western . . 80 (paid) 205 88 117 



Midland .... IOO 187 95 92 



London and Brighton . 50 76 28J 47$ 



While the general situation in the railway world had been 

 thus developing, there was a revival, in 1846, of the idea that 

 the work of Private Bill Committees in respect to railway 

 schemes should be supplemented by some other form of 

 inquiry into their merits. 



Writing on this subject in the issue of his " Railway Maga- 

 zine " for July, 1837, John Herapath had said : 



" It has long been anxiously expected that Parliament 

 would take some steps to relieve itself from the onerous 

 duties of investigating and deciding on railway matters. 

 Probably no tribunals can be less fitted for inquiries of this 

 kind than Parliamentary Committees, of which the House of 

 Commons has lately given a demonstrative proof in the case 

 of the Brighton line. After Committees of the two Houses 

 had sat nearly the whole of last session, and a Committee of 

 the Commons for thirty-five days of the present ; after the 

 Committee's reports had been made on each of the lines and 

 near 300,0007. of the subscribers' money had been wasted, 

 the House of Commons stamped its own opinion of all those 

 labours by giving them the ' go-by,' and referring the whole 

 four lines to the judgment of a military engineer." 



As for the element of uncertainty in the decisions of Parlia- 

 mentary Committees, F. S. Williams is responsible for the 

 statement that six railway Bills rejected by Commons Com- 

 mittees in 1844 were passed on precisely the same evidence 

 in 1845 ; that of eighteen Bills rejected in 1845 seven were 

 passed unaltered in 1846 ; and that of six Bills thrown out 

 by Committees of the House of Lords in 1845 four were 

 adopted by other Committees in 1846. 



The failure, however, of the special department of the 

 Board of Trade, created on the recommendation of Mr Glad- 



