ed portion of the trade was any longer subject
to restriction, and Mr. Gladstone, after due consultation with superior
ministers, proposed a bill for removing the prohibition altogether.[165]
He also brought in a bill (April 1844) for the regulation of companies.
It was when he was president of the board of trade that the first
Telegraph Act was passed. 'I was well aware,' he wrote, 'of the
advantage of taking them into the hands of the government, but I was
engaged in a plan which contemplated the ultimate acquisition of the
railways by the public, and which was much opposed by the railway
companies, so that to have attempted taking the telegraphs would have
been hopeless. The bill was passed, but the executive machinery two
years afterwards broke down.'

RAILWAYS

Questions that do not fall within the contentions of party usually cut a
meagre figure on the page of the historian, and the railway policy of
this decade is one of those questions. It was settled without much
careful deliberation or foresight, and may be said in the main to have
shaped itself. At the time when Mr. Gladstone presided over the
department of trade, an immense extension of the railway system was seen
to be certain, and we may now smile at what then seemed the striking
novelty of such a prospect. Mr. Gladstone proposed a select committee on
the subject, guided its deliberations, drew its reports, and framed the
bill that was founded upon them. He dwelt upon the favour now beginning
to be shown to the new roads by the owners of land through which they
were to pass, so different from the stubborn resistance that had for
long been offered; upon the cheapened cost of construction; upon the
growing disposition to employ redundant capital in making railways,
instead of running the risks that had made foreign investment so
disastrous. It was not long, indeed, before this very disposition led to
a mania that was even more widely disastrous than any foreign investment
had been since the days of the South Sea bubble. Meanwhile, Mr.
Gladstone's Railway Act of 1844, besides a number of working regulations
for the day, laid down two principles of the widest range: reserving to
the state the full right of intervention in the concerns of the railway
companies, and giving to the state the option to purchase a line at the
end of a certain term at twenty-five years' purchase of the divisible
profits.[166]

It was during these yea