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, finding 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 protective 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 Government 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 amalgamations 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 {274}sixth half-yearly meeting, at Paddington, of the South Wales Railway Company (of which he was also chairman), and reported in "The Times" of the following day. Referring to a pamphlet which had been issued attacking the policy of the Great Western Railway Company, Mr Russell said:--