has been formed; and they bequeath to us all that there was in them of good. The periodical abolitions of tyrannical laws have left the administration of justice not only uninjured, but purified. Dead and buried creeds have not carried with them the essential morality they contained, which still exists, uncontaminated by the sloughs of superstition. And all that there is of justice and kindness and beauty, embodied in our cumbrous forms of etiquette, will live perennially when the forms themselves have been forgotten. {52} RAILWAY MORALS AND RAILWAY POLICY. [_First published in the_ Edinburgh Review _for October 1854_.] Believers in the intrinsic virtues of political forms, might draw an instructive lesson from the politics of our railways. If there needs a conclusive proof that the most carefully-framed constitutions are worthless, unless they be embodiments of the popular character—if there needs a conclusive proof, that governmental arrangements in advance of the time will inevitably lapse into congruity with the time; such proof may be found over and over again repeated in the current history of joint-stock enterprises. As devised by Act of Parliament, the administrations of our public companies are almost purely democratic. The representative system is carried out in them with scarcely a check. Shareholders elect their directors, directors their chairman; there is an annual retirement of a certain proportion of members of the board, giving facilities for superseding them; and, by this means, the whole ruling body may be changed in periods varying from three to five years. Yet, not only are the characteristic vices of our political state reproduced in each of these mercantile corporations—some even in an intenser degree—but the very form of government, while remaining nominally democratic, is substantially so remodelled as to become a miniature of our national constitution. The direction, ceasing to fulfil its theory as a {53} council formed of members who possess equal powers, falls under the control of some one member of superior cunning, will, or wealth, to whom the majority become so subordinate, that the decision on every question depends on the course he takes. Proprietors, instead of constantly exercising their franchise, allow it to become on all ordinary occasions a dead letter. Retiring directors are so habitually re-elected without opposition, and have so great a power of insuring their own election when opposed, that the board becomes practically a close body; and it is only when the misgovernment grows extreme enough to produce a revolutionary agitation among the shareholders, that any change can be effected. Thus, a mixture of the monarchic, the aristocratic, and the democratic elements, is repeated with such modifications only as the circumstances involve. The modes of action, too, are substantially the same; save in this, that the copy outruns the original. Threats of