It was in vain that the officers of the Crown and the Government were implored by the trading community, who dreaded a Gold Famine, to sanction a deviation from the rigid rule of the Standing Order in face of the exceptional outbreak of an epidemic of speculation. This reached its height, it seems to us, just a month before the Governor of the Bank of England could be persuaded that the potato-rot was rendering famine inevitable. In the quarter ending September, 1845, there were in the market for sale £500,000,000 of stock, scrip, or letters of allotment. The shocking waste of resources that this covered is proved by two sets of figures. According to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in the years 1842-46, the capital authorised to be raised was in each year respectively £6,000,000, £4,500,000, £18,000,000, £59,000,000, and for the last of these years £126,000,000! In 1842-45 the amounts [Illustration: THE QUEEN IN THE ROYAL GALLERY, ST. GEORGE’S CHAPEL. (_After the Portrait by G. E. Dawe, 1846._)] expended, however, were only £3,000,000, £4,500,000, £6,000,000, £14,000,000, and £36,000,000. In the latter half of 1846, of an authorised capital of £146,000,000, only £27,000,000 was spent. But in the records of the Victorian epoch there is nothing more curious than this fact--that of the vast sum expended during this mania, one-fifth was spent on buying land and on Parliamentary expenses, and the remaining four-fifths on materials and labour, skilled and unskilled. Some idea of the resources and the folly of the England of Queen Victoria’s youth may be gained from the fact that, during the period 1843-47, £170,000,000 were raised--£130,000,000 by shares and £40,000,000 by loans--in order to open 3,665 miles of railway for traffic.[70] It has been said that the Railway Mania was at its height in the quarter ending September, 1845. The Bank rate of interest then stood at 2½ per cent. In November it rose to 3½ per cent., and then panic smote timid investors. They glutted the market with their shares. And yet the curious thing is that the witnesses who were examined before the Committee of the House of Commons on Commercial Distress seem to agree in asserting that the general trade of the country was active at the time, and that very few people had the slightest suspicion that it was utterly unsound. Mr. E. Gardner of Manchester, in his evidence, gave an excellent and vivid sketch of industrial England at this period, when he said: “The commercial difficulty began, I think, about the middle of 1846. A good deal of business was done in 1846, but trade was not in a wholesome state; it appeared to flourish by the great abundance of money, and the great facility in getting long paper discounted.... I think, in the early part of 1846, _we were at about the height of our apparent prosperity_.... In the manufacturing districts there was a greater supply of goods than was justified by the demand. Immediately