Turn we now to contractors. Railway-enterprise has given to this class of men a gigantic development; not only in respect of numbers, but in respect of the vast wealth to which some of them have acquired. Originally, half a dozen miles of earthwork, fencing, and bridges, was as much as any single contractor undertook. Of late years, however it has become common for one man to engage to construct an entire railway; and deliver it to the company in a fit condition for opening. Great capital is required for this. Great profits are made by it. And the fortunes accumulated in course of time have been such, that sundry contractors are named as being each able to make a railway at his own {73} cost. But they are as insatiable as millionaires in general; and so long as they continue in business at all, are, in some sort, forced to provide new undertakings to keep their plant employed. As may be imagined, enormous stocks of working appliances are needed: many hundreds of earth-waggons and of horses; many miles of temporary rails and sleepers; some dozen locomotive engines, and several fixed ones; innumerable tools; besides vast stores of timber, bricks, stone, rails, and other constituents of permanent works, that have been bought on speculation. To keep the capital thus invested, and also a large staff of _employés_, standing idle, entails loss, partly negative, partly positive. The great contractor, therefore, is both under a strong stimulus to get fresh work, and enabled by his wealth to do this. Hence the not unfrequent inversion of the old arrangement under which companies and engineers employed contractors, into an arrangement under which contractors employ engineers and form companies. Many recent undertakings have been thus set on foot. The most gigantic project which private enterprise has yet dared, originated with a distinguished contracting firm. In some cases this mode of procedure may, perhaps, be advantageous; but in far more numerous cases its results are disastrous. Interested in promoting railway extensions, even in a greater degree than engineers and lawyers, contractors habitually co-operate with these, either as agents or as coadjutors. Lines are fostered into being, which it is known from the beginning, will not pay. Of late, it has become common for landowners, merchants, and others personally interested, who, under the belief that their indirect gains will compensate for their meagre dividends, have themselves raised part of the capital for a local railway, but cannot raise the rest—it has become common for such to make an agreement with a wealthy contractor to construct the line, taking in part payment a portion of the shares, amounting to perhaps a third of the whole, and to charge for his work according to {74} a schedule of prices to be thereafter settled between himself and the engineer. By this last clause the contractor renders himself secure. It would never answer