but a marked case of the distorted representations which under such conditions self-interest is sure to engender. If we discover of this or that scheme, that it was got up by the local nobility and gentry—that they employed to make the survey a third-rate engineer, who was ready in anticipation of future benefit to do this for his bare expenses—that principals and agent wearied the directors of an adjacent trunk-line to take up their project; threatened that if they did not their great rival would; alarmed them into concession; asked for a contribution to their expenses; and would have gained all these points but for shareholders’ resistance—we do but discover the organized tactics which, in course of time, naturally grow up under such stimuli. It is not that these facts are particularly remarkable. From the gross instance of the landowner who asked £8000 for that which he eventually accepted £80 for, down to the {65} every-day instances of influence used to get railway accommodation for the neighbourhood, the acts of the landed class are simply manifestations of the average character acting under special conditions. All that it now behoves us to notice, is, that we have here a large and powerful body whose interests are ever pressing on railway extension, irrespective of its intrinsic propriety. The great change in the attitude of the Legislature towards railways, from “the extreme of determined rejection or dilatory acquiescence, to the opposite extreme of unlimited concession,” was simultaneous with the change above described. It could not well fail to be so. Supplying, as the landowning community does, so large a portion of both Houses of Parliament, it necessarily follows that the play of private interests seen in the first, repeats itself in the last under modified forms, and complicated by other influences. Remembering the extent to which legislators were themselves implicated in the speculations of the mania, it is unlikely that they should since have been free from personal bias. A return proved, that in 1845 there were 157 members of Parliament whose names were on the registers of new companies for sums varying from £291,000 downwards. The supporters of new projects boasted of the numbers of votes they could command in the House. Members were personally canvassed, and peers were solicited. It was publicly complained in the upper chamber, that “it was nearly impossible to bring together a jury, some members of which were not interested in the railway they were about to assess.” Doubtless this state of things was in a great degree exceptional; and there has since been not only a diminution of the temptations, but a marked increase of equitable feeling. Still, it is not to be expected that private interests should cease to act. It is not to be expected that a landowner who, out of Parliament, exerts himself to get a railway for his district, should, when in Parliament, not employ the power his new position gives him to the same {66} end.