To a certain extent one may sympathise with landowners who feared that the amenities of their estates might be prejudiced by an innovation of which so much evil was being said; but, as a rule (to which there were some very honourable exceptions) it was found that their scruples in regard alike to their own interests and to the national welfare eventually resolved themselves into a question of how much money could be got out of the companies. Thus the extortionate prices paid for land often had no relation to the actual value of the land itself. They were simply the highest amount the railway company were prepared to pay the landowner for the withdrawal of his threatened opposition. If the company resisted the exorbitant demands made upon them, and would not give a sufficiently high bribe, they were so strongly opposed that they generally lost their Bill when they first applied for it to Parliament. Thereupon they would {249}yield, or effect a compromise on, the terms asked for, announce that they had made amicable arrangements with the opposition, re-introduce their Bill in the following Session, and then succeed in getting it passed. It might happen, even then, that the companies obtained their powers subject only to a variety of hampering or vexatious restrictions which the landed gentry or others were able to enforce in order that due respect should be shown to their fears or their prejudices. In some of the earlier railway Acts the companies were forbidden to use any "locomotives or moveable engines" without the written consent of the owners or occupiers of the land through which their lines passed. One of the clauses of the Liverpool and Manchester Act provided that "no steam engine shall be set up in the township of Burtonwood or Winwick, and no locomotive shall be allowed to pass along the line within those townships which shall be considered by Thomas Lord Lilford or by the Rector of Winwick to be a nuisance or annoyance to them from the noise or smoke thereof." The same two individuals secured insertion of a clause in the Warrington and Newton Railway Act to the effect that every locomotive used within the parishes mentioned should be "constructed on best principles for enabling it to consume its own smoke and preventing noise in the machinery or motion thereof," and should use "no coal, but only coke or other such fuel" as his lordship and the rector might approve. The story of the London and Birmingham Railway is especially significant of the general conditions under which the English railway system came into being.