Sir Robert Peel admitted, in the debate on the currency at the opening of last session of parliament, that the act of 1844 had failed in one of its principal objects--viz., the discouraging of perilous and irrational speculation. He might have gone a step farther, and admitted that it had been the greatest possible _encourager, for a short season, of the most absurd and dangerous undertakings_. The proof of this is decisive. The Bank Charter Act was passed in May 1844, and from that time till the first check experienced in October 1845, was, beyond all comparison, the wildest and most absurd season of speculation ever known in English history. Among others, railways, to the amount of £363,000,000 sterling, received the sanction of the legislature, within two years after the new Bank Charter Act had passed. And so far was government from giving any check to these undertakings--the results of which, monstrous when co-existing with a fettered currency, are apparent in the present wreck of railway property--that they gave them the utmost encouragement, both by lowering the sum required for deposits from ten to five per cent, and by bestowing, at once in public and private, the most lavish encomiums on the immense present and prospective blessings they would confer upon the country. It is not surprising that a government, looking only to temporary objects, did so; for the railway mania, while it lasted, and before the ruinous effects in which it necessarily terminated, when fettered by the currency laws, had developed themselves, gave a passing stimulus to the demand for labour, and increase to industry, which rendered men blind to the whole consequences of the course on which they were launched. Sir Robert Peel ably and emphatically enforced the favourable condition of the nation, and dwelt with peculiar emphasis on the diminution in criminal commitments through the country, in his opening speech of the session of 1846--although he ascribed it to the free-trade measures, not the first effect of the general insanity on the subject of railways.