without 'tis a bird in the air:" and confirmed it
with an oath. Briefly, buzz! buzz! buzz!

Gray was crushed, Trevethick driven out of
the country, stout Steevie thwarted, badgered,
taunted, and even insulted, and bespattered with
dirt, I might say with dung; since his opponents
discharged their own brains at him by speech
and writing. At last, when after the manner of
men they had manured their benefactor well,
they consented to reap him. Railways
prevailed, and increased, till lo and behold a
prime minister with a spade delving one in the
valley of the Trent. The tide turned; good
working railways from city to city became an
approved investment of genuine capital;
notwithstanding the frightful frauds and extortion
to which the projectors were exposed in a parliament,
which, under a new temptation, showed
itself as corrupt and greedy as any nation or age
can parallel.

When this sober state of things had endured
some time, there came a year that money was
loose, and a speculative fever due in the whirligig
of time. Then railways bubbled.

New ones were advertised, fifty a month, and
all went to a premium. High and low scrambled
for the shares, even when the projected line was
to run from the town of Nought to the village of
Nothing, across a goose common. The flame
spread, fanned by prospectus and advertisement,
two mines of glowing fiction, compared with
which the legitimate article is a mere tissue of
understatements; Princes sat in railway tenders,
and clove the air like the birds whose effigies
surmount their armorials; some stiffish Peers
relaxed into Boards; Bishops warned their clergy
against avarice, and buttered Hudson an inch
thick for shares; and turned their little aprons
into great pockets; men, stainless hitherto, put
down their infants, nurses included, as
independent subscribers, and bagged the coupons,
capturi tartaros: nearly every thing, that had a
name, and, by some immense fortuity, could
write it, demanded its part in the new and
fathomless source of wealth: a charwoman's two
sons were living in a garret on fifteen shillings
apiece per week; down went their excellencies'
names for £37,000 worth of bubbling iron;
another shareholder applied imperiously from a
house in Grosvenor-square; he had breakfasted
on the steps. Once more, in Time's whirligig,
gentlemen and their footmen jostled one another
on the exchange, and a motley crew of peers and
printers, vicars and admirals, professors, cooks,
costermongers, cotton-spinners, waiters, coachmen,
priests, potboys, bankers, braziers, dairymen,
mail-guards, barristers, spinsters, butchers,
beggars, duchesses, rag merchants; in one word,
of Nobs and Snobs; fought and scrambled pell
mell for the popular paper; and all to get rich
in a day.*
*For the humours of the time see the parliamentary
return of Railway Subscribers, published 1846:
Francis's British Railway: Evans's Commercial
Crisis: and the pamphlets and journals of the day.

Richard Hardie had some money in existing
railways; but he declined to invest his hard cash
upon hypotheticals. He was repeatedly solicited
to be a director; but always declined. Once he
was offered a canny bribe of a thousand pounds
to let his name go on a provisional committee. He
refused with a chracteristic remark; "I never
buy any merchandise at a fancy price, not even
hard cash."

Antidote to the universal mania, Barkington
had this one wet blanket: an unpopular institution;
but far more salutary than a damp sheet;
especially in time of Bubble.

Nearly all his customers consulted Richard
Hardie, and this was the substance of his replies:
"The Bubbles of History, including the great
one of my youth, were national, as well as
individual, follies. It is not so now: the railways,
that ruin their allottees and directors, will be pure
additions to the national property, and some day
remove one barrier more from commerce. The
Dutch tulip frenzy went on a petty fancy; the
Railway fury goes on a great fact. Our
predecessors blew mere soap bubbles; we blow an iron
bubble: but here the distinction ends; in 1825
the country undertook immediate engagements,
to fulfil which a century's income would not have
sufficed: to-day a thousand railway companies
are registered, requiring a capital of six hundred
million; and another thousand projected, to cost
another five hundred million. Where is the
money to come from? If the world was both
cultivated and civilised (instead of neither), and
this nation could be sold, with every building,
ship, quadruped, jewel, and marketable female
in it, it would not fetch the money to make
these railways: yet the country undertakes to
create them in three years with its floating capital.
Arithmetic of Bedlam! The thing cannot last a
year without collapsing."

Richard Hardie talked like this from first to
last.

But, when he saw that shares invariably
mounted; that even those who, for want of
interest, had to buy them at a premium, sold them
at a profit; when he saw paupers making large
fortunes in a few months, by buying into every
venture and selling the next week; he itched for
his share of the booty, and determined to profit
in act by the credulity of mankind as well as
expose it in words. He made use of his large
connexions to purchase shares; which he took care
to part with speedily; he cleared a good deal of
money; and that made him hungrier: he went
deeper and deeper into what he called Flat catching,
till one day he stood to win thirty thousand
pounds at a coup.

But it is dangerous to be a convert, real or
false, to Bubble: the game is to be rash at once,
and turn prudent at the full tide. When Richard
Hardie was up to his chin in these time bargains,
came an incident not easy to foresee: the
conductors of the Times, either from patriotism,
or long sighted policy, punctured the bladder,
though they were making thousands weekly by