have spent time and care upon
to build, to the respectable merchant, lawyer, or banker, who thinks
the best road that which has the softest cushions and the most
comfortable seats on which to ride?

Railroad-building, remarks a late writer, (Mr. Whiton,) may be
divided into three periods,--the first, the _introductory_, in which
roads were a sort of experimental enterprise, where the men who
labored expected to be paid for their time or money, and were
willing to wait a reasonable time for the expected profit. Second,
the _speculative_ period, when men were possessed with an unhealthy
desire for fortune-making, and, not content to wait the natural
harvest of the seed sown, departed from the sound and honest
principles of construction and management; trying, at first, by all
sorts of pretence and misrepresentation, to conceal, and last by
legislation to counterbalance, the results of their ignorance and of
their insane desires. Railroads were compared, as an investment, to
banks; and it was even supposed that the more they cost the more
they would divide; and tunnels, rock-cuts, and viaducts were then as
much sought after as they are now avoided. Shrewd and intelligent
business-men, who had made for themselves fortunes, embraced these
ridiculous opinions, and seemed at once, upon taking hold of
railroad-enterprises, to lose whatever of common sense they before
might have possessed; and even at the present day these same men
have not the manly honesty to acknowledge their errors, but endeavor
to cover them up with greater.--The third period is that of _reaction_,
which embraces the present time. To a person unacquainted with the
management of railroads, to see a body of men, no one of whom has
ever before had anything to do with mechanical operations, assembled
to decide upon the relative merits of the different plans of bridges
or of locomotives or cars, upon the best means of reducing the
working-expenses of a machine of whose component parts they have not
the slightest idea, of the most complicated and elaborate piece of
mechanism that men have ever designed, might at first seem absurd;
but custom has made it right. It is generally supposed that the
moment a man, be he lawyer, doctor, or merchant, is chosen director
in a railroad enterprise, immediately he becomes possessed of all
knowledge of mechanics, finance, and commerce; but, judging from past
experience, it appears in reality that he leaves behind at such time