of passengers and goods? Many common highways have been made by
parishes and landowners combined for the public convenience; the
capital so laid out paid no direct interest (the road was a highway,
not a turnpike): how does this case differ from a railway that pays
no dividend on the original stock? If the railway carried me from
Exeter to London in five hours for thirteen shillings, what does it
matter to me whether the company pays 2-1/2 per cent or 6-1/2 per
cent to its original shareholders? In a very few small and special
cases we have seen a railway line not pay for the working, and be
closed. In a few other cases, where the dividend paid is less than 4-
1/2 per cent, it is possible that the utility of the line to the
public is less than the loss of the shareholders in a non-paying
investment. I say this is a possible and conceivable case--in some
very short lines or in some very thinly inhabited districts. Such
cases I believe rare. Not rarely the initial cost of the line has
been seriously increased by promotion, legal and parliamentary
expenses, enormous sums extorted for land, severance, etc.; if these
expenses can be done away with, these cases of railways constructed
at a loss _on the whole_ to the nation may be made fewer still.

The way in which the railway monopoly, the monopoly of the great
companies, has grown up is noteworthy. To enable a company to take
the land of a private man compulsorily a private Act of Parliament
was necessary. The Parliamentary Committees then said, We will not
enable you to dispossess forcibly private owners of their land for "a
public purpose" unless you further shew that this includes a public
advantage. Private owners were of course let in to show cause against
a new railway; they always talked like Naboth (the Parliamentary
Committees must have been wearied by the continual references to
Naboth), but the genuine private owners sold themselves at the last