been executed up to the present time are extremely inconsiderable, and the railroads at this moment in execution are for very short distances; their whole united length not exceeding 44 leagues. Before the session of the present year, no company had ever seriously proposed to undertake a railroad of any considerable length, without the assistance of the Treasury and throughout the session, the Chambers, the Government, and the capitalists were in the greatest state of indecision as to the result of these undertakings. Were the proposed railroads safe or dangerous speculations? Should they be executed by the State, as has been done in Belgium, or should they be abandoned to private enterprise and the offers of trading companies? If such companies were allowed to undertake these works, ought they to be left to their own resources, or assisted by the Treasury? Would it be more advantageous to adopt at once the proposals of any particular company, or by opening the undertaking to competition to obtain from the shareholders a reduction either in the term of their monopoly, the rate of their charges, or the amount of the pecuniary assistance they might claim from government? Such were the difficulties which were to be solved; and the questions to which they gave birth were of so novel a kind, that no one was ready or able to give them the decisive answer of a settled opinion.

And here, though we may deplore the numerous barriers which seem hitherto to have checked the progress of public works in France, the apathy of the public (which for a time, however, gave way to the opposite extreme), the local prejudices of the deputies, the disadvantages of the centralized system in operations of this nature, and the tedious proceedings of the legislature and the conseil d'état on all public undertakings, we cannot but derive a lesson of some utility from the contrast of these negative defects with the headlong impetuosity with which similar projects are set on foot by the people and sanctioned by the legislature of this country. It is not our purpose to dwell upon the mysteries and malpractices of railway bills, they are chiefly of a local and per

to St. Germain, with a part of the railway from Lyons to St. Etienne, are the only roads adapted for locomotive engines in the whole country. The others are little more than the lines for tram-carts which have long existed in our mining districts.

sonal nature, and deserve little more than our contempt. But we are persuaded that the time is not far distant when the public will find to its cost that in those controversies between rival lines, hostile engineers, and jealous landowners, there was no one to raise a voice for the general interests of the community, no one who attempted to lay down the true principles of social œconomy which ought to have regulated so very important a change in the means of communication. If such principles had been duly debated and recognized, the railroad monopoly would have remained the servant, instead of becoming the mistress of the public; vested rights of a perpetual character would not have been allowed to accrue to any of these speculations, and we should not have been driven to the dangerous resource of ex post facto legislation to obtain for the public service those advantages which ought to have formed the original conditions on which such bills were allowed to pass.

Unlike our government, however, the French administration had adopted a system; though such was the complexion of the government plan, that it was held to be imprudent to acknowledge it to the public. It was the secret intention of the administration to execute the railroads as it had undertaken to execute the high-roads and the principal lines of navigation; but the time was over when such pretensions to the monopoly of state-labour could appear otherwise than monstrous in France. Indeed it had been distinctly understood by the Chamber, which voted a sum of 500,000f. (£20,000) by the act of June 27th, 1833, for the purpose of surveying the intended lines of railroad, that these national surveys should be made over to such companies as might afterwards undertake the execution of the works. Accordingly it was not till the 8th of May, 1837, towards the close of a stormy session, that the government, after having excited the liveliest expectation by its protracted delay, brought in six bills for as many different railroads, all planned on the most different and even inconsistent principles. The four principal lines were intended to run from Paris to Brussels, Paris to Rouen, Paris to Orleans, and Marseilles to Lyons: their united length amounted to 230 leagues of railroad.

The only condition common to all these proposed lines was,

that the government, in order to encourage private companies to execute the great railroads of the kingdom, offered to assist their undertakings with the funds of the Treasury. The mode in which this assistance was to be granted, and the extent to which it was to reach, were regulated in the bills of the government by conditions which were merely variations of the same general design. Thus the Belgian line was to have an absolute grant of 20,000,000f., amounting to 25 per cent. on the total estimate of the cost; whilst the government was only to contribute 7,000,000 f., or 18 per cent. to the execution of the railroad to Rouen; and 3,000,000 f., being in the proportion of only one-tenth of the expenditure, to the works between Paris and Orleans. Nor did these variations stop here. In these three concerns, the assistance of the government was in the form of a grant or absolute bounty offered to the adventurers; but a different system was proposed for the road between Lyons and Marseilles. There, instead of joining its capital to the capital raised by the shareholders, the government proposed to interfere under the form of a guaranty, and to insure the company from all risk of loss accruing from the works they had undertaken to execute. By the second clause of the Lyons and Marseilles railway bill, the state guaranteed for thirty years a minimum interest at 4 per cent., on a capital of 70,000,000f.; that is to say, that if the net profit of the railroad did not amount to 4 per cent., the Treasury should make up the difference to the shareholders. But the liability of the Treasury went still further; for it might happen that the total receipts of the railroad should be insufficient to defray all the costs of repairs of locomotive engines, in which case the state would have had to pay something more in addition to the 4 per cent. interest on the capital!

In a country like France, where joint-stock companies and the marvellous results of combined capital are in their infancy, it was no unwise project to sustain the efforts of private speculators, even at the cost of some public sacrifices. But the Chambers were disgusted by the very first attempt made to apply this principle. It was impossible for the legislature to approve the system of an absolute pecuniary grant, which could have no other effect than to give the shares a

fictitious value on the Stock-Exchange, and to place a bounty in the hands of the original shareholders. The other system, which proposed to give public security for the interest of the capital, was open to objections of no less gravity, since it had a tendency to substitute the liability of the state for the liability of the adventurers, and to deprive them of the strongest spur to exertion, by relieving them from all apprehension of loss. The legislature was therefore frightened, and not without reason, by the extent of these liabilities, which the minister proposed to impose on the country; and the only railroads which it fairly took into consideration were, the line from Mulhouse to Thawn, which a company proposed to execute without any assistance from the government, and the line from Alais to the mines of Grand' Combe, in continuation of the line between the valley of the Rhone and the coalfields of the Cévennes, which was intended to supply the towns on the Mediterranean with coal-fuel.

But another consideration operated strongly upon the French Chamber of Deputies to induce them to throw out the proposals of the administration,-a consideration which we can hardly comprehend, unless we call to mind the ardent hostility of the democratic party in America against the chartered bank of the United States. The same feeling undoubtedly showed itself in France; and however little the Chamber might care for the system which intrusts to the government alone the care of executing these great enterprises of public improvement, it was readily deterred from abandoning the more important of these undertakings to private companies, by the fear, either that such companies would fail in the work, or that, if they proved sufficiently strong to accomplish it, their directors would constitute a new and formidable kind of aristocracy, which might destroy, or at least compromise, the unity of the administrative power in the country. We shall quote some passages from M. Dufaure's Report on the Lyons and Marseilles Railroad, where these notions are very clearly and frankly expressed.

"We become more and more attached to that unity of our nation which was organized by the labours of the Constituent Assembly fifty years ago. Our laws, our manners, and our customs, tend to strengthen it day by day. The limits of our former provinces have disappeared; the vestiges

of their ancient idioms are vanishing; and the epochs of their gradual agglomeration are now an almost forgotten history. Mingled as they are in the camp and in the school, under the same masters and under the same standard, the French of the North are now the brethren of the French of the South; and everything which tends to rivet these bonds of our social unity more closely, serves the most urgent interests of the country. Nothing can contribute more actively to this result than the great lines of railroad, those astonishing channels of traffic, which bring the population into rapid intercourse, and intermingle the produce of their territories and of their occupations. The extremities of France will be brought more together, and more united, when less than three days will suffice to go from Lille to Marseilles, and from Strasbourg to Bordeaux. "In the centre of these lines of communication is placed the capital of the kingdom, and another powerful interest of the community is thus satisfied the action of the central authority, which is too often wasted by the minute details of local interests, would become more rapid and more powerful than ever in those matters which ought really to call for its attention: nor can it be reckoned an advantage of light importance to direct this action with the greatest celerity upon all the frontiers of the kingdom, and to convey, in a single night, a detachment of fresh troops in perfect readiness for battle, from Paris to the banks of the Rhine, or from Lyons to the foot of the Alps.

:

"We are therefore of opinion that the principal lines of railroad communication, intended to unite the North and the South, the East and the West, and Paris with the outports of France, are matters not only of commercial but of national interest; and that it is right that the government should cause them to be executed with all the resources of science and of zeal which it can command, that these lines should belong to the government with the power, at pleasure, and without consulting any private interest, of keeping them up, using them, or, if the misfortunes of the country should demand it, of destroying them."

It is perfectly clear that M. Dufaure regards railroads as political instruments rather than as public conveyances. He holds that a government is just as much at liberty to destroy a railroad as to suppress a telegraph; and thus to check, by a mere nod, the most imperious requirements of business and civilized life. But M. Dufaure does not appear to have inquired whether any government, having made a railroad, can remain in possession of the means required to manage it; or whether any government will undertake the execution of a work which must afterwards be used and managed by others. The passage we have cited expresses an opinion, somewhat enthusiastically rendered, but very dangerous in principle; and the government was but too ready to adopt