uld equal twenty-four millions sterling in the permanent improvement
of the land.

The ground, therefore, was sound on which Lord George cautiously, and
after due reflection, ventured to place his foot.

And now, after the reports of these two royal commissions, what was the
state of railway enterprise in Ireland in the autumn of '46, when a vast
multitude could only subsist by being employed by the government, and
when the government had avowedly no reproductive or even useful work
whereon to place them; but allotted them to operations which were
described by Colonel Douglas, the inspector of the government himself,
'as works which would answer no other purpose than that of obstructing
the public conveyances?'

In '46, acts of Parliament were in existence authorizing the
construction of more than fifteen hundred miles of railway in Ireland,
and some of these acts had passed so long as eleven years previously,
yet at the end of '46 only one hundred and twenty-three miles of railway
had been completed, and only one hundred and sixty-four were in the
course of completion, though arrested in their progress from want of
funds. Almost in the same period, two thousand six hundred miles of
railway had been completed in England, and acts of Parliament had passed
for constructing five thousand four hundred miles in addition: in the
whole, eight thousand miles.

What then was the reason of this debility in Ireland in prosecuting
these undertakings? Were they really not required; were the elements
of success wanting? The first element of success in railway enterprise,
according to the highest authorities, is population; property is only
the second consideration. Now, Ireland in '46 was more densely inhabited
than England. A want of population could not therefore be the cause.
But a population so impoverished as the Irish could not perhaps avail
themselves of the means of locomotion; and yet it appeared from research
that the rate of passengers on the two Irish railways that were open
greatly exceeded in number that of the passengers upon English and
Scotch railways. The average number of passengers on English and Scotch
railways was not twelve thousand per mile per annum, while on the Ulster
railway the number was nearly twenty-two thousand, and on the Dublin and
Drogheda line the number exceeded eighteen thousand.

The cause of the weakness in Ireland to prosecute these undertakings
was the total want of domestic capital for