But it is not only in greater cost of transit that the evil has been felt; it has been felt also in diminished safety. The multiplication of railway accidents, which has of late years drawn so much attention, has been in no inconsiderable degree caused by the extension policy. The relation is not obvious; and we had ourselves no conception that such a relation existed, until the facts illustrative of it were furnished to us by a director who had witnessed the whole process of causation. When preference-share dividends and guarantees began to make large draughts upon half-yearly returns—when original stock was greatly depreciated, and the dividends upon it fell from 9 and 8 per cent. to 4 1/2 and 4 and 3 1/2, great dissatisfaction necessarily arose among shareholders. There were stormy meetings, motions of censure, and committees of investigation. Retrenchment was the general cry; and retrenchment was carried to a most imprudent extent. Directors with an indignant proprietary to face, and under the fear that their next dividend would be no greater, perhaps less, than the last, dared not to lay out money for the needful repairs. {100} Permanent way, reported to them as requiring to be replaced, was made to serve awhile longer. Old rolling stock was not superseded by new to the proper extent; nor increased in proportion to the demand. Committees, appointed to examine where the expenditure could be cut down, went round discharging a porter here, dispensing with a clerk there, and diminishing the salaries of the officials in general. To such a length was this policy carried, that in one case, to effect a saving of £1200 per annum, the working staff was so crippled as to cause, in the course of a few years, a loss of probably £100,000: such, at least, is the opinion of the gentleman on whose authority we make this statement, who was himself one of the retrenchment committee. What, now, was the necessary result of all this? With the line out of condition; with engines and carriages neither sufficient in number nor in the best working order; with drivers, guards, porters, clerks, and the rest, decreased to the smallest number with which it was possible to work; with inexperienced managers in place of the experienced ones driven away by reduced salaries; what was likely to occur? Was it not certain that an apparatus of means just competent to deal with the ordinary traffic, would be incompetent to deal with extraordinary traffic? that a decimated body of officials under inferior regulation, would fail in the emergencies sure from time to time to occur? that with way and works and rolling stock all below par, there would occasionally be a concurrence of small defects, permitting something to go wrong? Was not a multiplication of accidents inevitable? No one can doubt it. And if we trace back this result step by step to its original cause—the reckless expenditure on new lines—we shall see further reason to doubt