TRANSACTION'S OF THE SECTIONS. 157 



Sir Robert Peel used to speak of the " torpid hand of Government," and depre- 

 cated the State or public boaies doing what trading companies could do instead. 

 I well remember, not long after his passing bis comparatively free-trade tariff, 

 when we thought he was meditating, though nut yet determined on, the Repeal 

 of the Corn Laws, how, -peaking one day on some gas or water bill and there- 

 fore not reported by the papers or Hansard, he described what, in his opinion, 

 was a proper remedy for a bad, inadequate, or unduly dear supply — namely, to 

 establish another company to compete with the one complained of. And I "well 

 remember how, with mo: t unwonted audacity (for at no time of my life have I 

 but with extreme reluctance, and never, I may add, with any success, attempted 

 a speech in Parliament), I on that occasion jumped up and said that when he 

 had studied the question of Free Trade a little more he would find it was per- 

 fectly applicable to foreign corn and sugar to which he refused to apply it, but 

 not without stringent restrictions to water, gas, and railways, to which he was 

 then applying it — that, unlike the former, the latter were all in their nature mono- 

 polies, and ought, for the sake of the public, to be very carefully restricted as 

 such*. He ended by applying Free Trade to foreign corn and provisions, but 

 protesting against its application to foreign, as distinguished from colonial, sugar, 

 and persisting to the last in his imsound and disastrous encouragement of unre- 

 stricted competition in railways. His various successors in the Government have 

 ever since left each proposed line of railway to be unsystematieally dealt with 

 in the most costly manner each on its own merits, by successive separate com- 

 mittees of both Houses, not only selected at haphazard, but without being furnished 

 for their guidance witli any clear principles laid down by Parliament, not even 

 as to whether the fact of a proposed line being a competing line should be con- 

 sidered a recommendation or an objection. The natural result of such a continued 

 lottery in legislation has been an immense needless increase to the cost of rail- 

 ways in the shape of parliamentary expenses both in proposing and opposing 

 lines — expenses which have unfairly kept down the average dividends to share- 



* Memorandum sent me by an eminent economist and statistician; — 



" In 1824 a matured plan of a general public system of railway communication was 

 brought before Sir R. Peel by Mr. Thomas Gray of Exeter. The plan was based, 

 not upon any mere imagination as to mechanical power, but upon tried and ascer- 

 tained instances of what had been done and was then doing by steam-power in 

 railway transit on iron tramways in mines and colleries ; and it proposed the general 

 application of these means, rudimentary it was true, but improvable on more 

 matured trial, as was afterwards abundantly proved. Now any one who had a 

 perception of the primary economical importance of cheap and quick transit to a 

 nation, especially to a manufacturing nation, woidd have regarded the proposal with 

 lively interest. But he dismissed it with apathy. Gray pressed it then upon the 

 commercial community of Lancashire, by whom it was taken up, with what ultimate 

 results we know ; but they took it up solely at first for the transit of their goods, 

 and not for the transit of passengers mainly as Gray proposed, and which proved 

 afterwards its great success. 



"After the great demonstrations afforded by subsequent experience of the gain in 

 economical power to a nation of this new means of communication, and of what 

 should have been the new ' King's Highway,' or public means of transit at the 

 lowest cost, the cost of the service instead of a trading profit (in which view it was 

 successfully taken up in Belgium and in other parts of the Continent), he still was 

 apathetic, and left it to be pursued by private enterprise — an error recognized as 

 lamentable in its consequences by Robert Stephenson and railway authorities them- 

 selves, as well as by leading political economists. The consequences of that 

 economical error are recognized as now burtbening the freedom of transit in this 

 kingdom with some six or seven millions of extra cost, with reduced dividends to 

 the capitalists, with reduced speeds, and, from misfitting trains, increased dangers 

 of life in transit, and all th evils of disunity of our communications anion: 



upwards of a hundred Directorates. Bismark in Germany, and Minghetti and other 

 statesmen in Italy, are now retracing the errors of our example, and resuming those 

 public duties which only economical ignorance abandoned or neglected." 



