The public will be better served; constituents will be satisfied; friends will be pleased; perhaps private ends gained: and under some or all of these incentives, affirmative votes are readily given. Thus, from the Legislature also, there has of late years proceeded a factitious stimulus to railway extensions. From Parliament to Parliamentary agents, and the general body of lawyers concerned in railway enterprise, is a ready transition. With these, the getting up and carrying of new lines and branches is a matter of business. Whoever traces the process of obtaining a railway Act, or considers the number of legal transactions involved in the execution of railway works, or notes the large sums that figure in half-yearly reports under the head of “law charges;” will at once see how strong are the temptations which a new project holds out to solicitors, conveyancers, and counsel. It has been shown that in past years, parliamentary expenses have varied from £650 to £3000 per mile; of which a large proportion has gone into the pockets of the profession. In one contest, £57,000 was spent among six counsel and twenty solicitors. At a late {68} meeting of one of our companies it was pointed out, that the sum expended in legal and parliamentary expenses during nine years, had reached £480,000; or had averaged £53,500 a-year. With these and scores of like facts before them, it would be strange did not so acute a body of men as lawyers use vigorous efforts and sagacious devices to promote fresh enterprises. Indeed, if we look back at the proceedings of 1845, we shall suspect, not only that lawyers are still the active promoters of fresh enterprises, but often the originators of them. Many have heard how in those excited times the projects daily announced were not uncommonly set afloat by local solicitors—how these looked over maps to see where plausible lines could be sketched out—how they canvassed the local gentry to obtain provisional committeemen—how they agreed with engineers to make trial surveys—how, under the wild hopes of the day, they found little difficulty in forming companies—and how most of them managed to get as far as the Committee on Standing Orders, if no farther. Remembering all this, and remembering that those who were successful are not likely to have forgotten their cunning, but rather to have yearly exercised and increased it, we may expect to find railway lawyers among the most influential of the many parties conspiring to urge railway proprietaries into disastrous undertakings; and we shall not be deceived. To a great extent they are in league with engineers. From the proposal to the completion of a new line, the lawyer and the engineer work together; and their interests are throughout identical. While the one makes the survey, the other prepares the book of reference. The parish plans which the one gets ready, the other deposits. The notices to owners and occupiers which the one fills in, the other serves upon those concerned.