It is estimated by Mr. Laing—and Mr. Stephenson, while declining to commit himself to the estimate, “does not believe he has overstated it,”—that out of the £280,000,000 already raised for the construction of our railways, £70,000,000 has been needlessly spent in contests, in duplicate lines, in “the multiplication of an immense number of schemes prosecuted at an almost reckless {106} expense;” and Mr. Stephenson believes that this sum is “a very inadequate representative of the actual loss in point of convenience, economy, and other circumstances connected with traffic, which the public has sustained by reason of parliamentary carelessness in legislating for railways.” Under an equitable interpretation of the proprietary contract, the greater part of this would have been avoided. The competition between rival companies in extension and branch-making, which has already done vast injury, and the effects of which, if not stopped, will, in the opinion of Mr. Stephenson, be such that “property now paying 5 1/2 per cent. will in ten years be worth only 3 per cent., and that on twenty-one millions of money”—this competition could never have existed in its intense and deleterious form under the limiting principle we advocate. Prompted by jealousy and antagonism, our companies have obtained powers for 2000 miles of railway which they have never made. The millions thus squandered in surveys and parliamentary contests—“food for lawyers and engineers”—would nearly all have been saved, had each supplementary line been obtainable only by an independent body of proprietors with no one to shield them from the penalties of reckless scheming. It is admitted that the branches and feeders constructed from competitive motives have not been laid out in the best directions for the public. To defeat, or retaliate upon, opponents, having been one of the ends—often the chief end—in making them, routes have been chosen especially calculated to effect this end; and the local traffic has in consequence been ill provided for. Had these branches and feeders, however, been left to the enterprise of their respective districts, aided by such other enterprise as they could attract, the reverse would have been the fact; seeing that on the average, in these smaller cases as in the greater ones, the routes which most accommodate the public must be the routes most profitable to projectors.