vigour, by which the whole resources of the country should be at once
stirred up and rendered ten times more available than they had ever
been before. This was known afterwards as "the Railway Mania," which,
like other manias, if they are not mere fever-fits of speculation, but
are founded on real and tangible gains, had its eager hopeful rise,
its inflated disproportioned exaggeration, its disastrous collapse,
its gradual recovery, and eventually its solid reasonable success. In
1845 the movement was hurrying on to the second stage of its history.

The great man of 1845 was Hudson the railway speculator, "the Railway
King." Fabulous wealth was attributed to him; immense power for the
hour was his. A seat in Parliament, entrance into aristocratic
circles, were trifles in comparison. We can remember hearing of a
great London dinner at which the lions were the gifted Prince, the
husband of the Queen, and the distorted shadow of George Stephenson,
the bourgeois creator of a network of railway lines, a Bourse of
railway shares; the winner, as it was then supposed, of a huge
fortune. It was said that Prince Albert himself had felt some
curiosity to see this man and hear him speak, and that their encounter
on this occasion was prearranged and not accidental.

The autumn of 1845 revealed another side to the country's history. The
rainy weather in the summer brought to sudden hideous maturity the
lurking potato disease. Any one who recalls the time and the aspect of
the fields must retain a vivid recollection of the sudden blight that
fell upon acres on acres of what had formerly been luxuriant
vegetation, under the sunshine which came late only to complete the
work of destruction; the withering and blackening of the leaves of the
plant, the sickening foetid odour of the decaying bulbs, which tainted
the heavy air for miles; the dismay that filled the minds of the