These ingenious reasons did not prevail.  People were reminded that the steam boats, the public works, the “Woods and Forests” under government charge, were not managed with remarkable success or economy.  The tempting dividends melted away, and projects for French railways, on the principle of the State taking profits and the speculators the risk, which had excited the admiration of Cato Morrisson, first hung fire and then exploded, so that rich districts of France which, on the system of “profits to private enterprise,” would have enjoyed railway conveyance ten years ago, are still left to the mercy of the slow diligences and slower waggons to this hour.

To a commercial country like England, the waste of a few millions on railways badly planned, are of little importance compared with the national saving effected by the cheap conveyance of produce.  The great importance of the direct line between Rugby, Macclesfield, and Manchester, is not that it saves an hour in the transit of an impatient traveller, but that it places in easy communication purely agricultural and thoroughly manufacturing communities, so as to render an interchange of produce easy.  Shareholders sometimes suffer, but the public always gains.  On the other hand, Parliament should take care that railway extension to blank districts is not prevented by conceding parallel lines to directors hunting for a dividend, by dividing instead of increasing the existing traffic.

When an alteration of the law settlement has released from parish bondage and vegetation those adscripti glebae agricultural labourers, the advantage of our network of railways will be still more felt.

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Stafford to Shrewsbury.—­The third line diverging from Stafford, counting the continuation of the London as a fourth, is the railway to Shrewsbury, passing through Newport and Wellington, where it joins the direct line from Wolverhampton, and affording, by a continuation which passes near Oswestry, Chirk, and Llangollen, {138} to Wrexham, Chester, and Birkenhead, another route to Liverpool, and, through Chester, the nearest way to Holyhead and Ireland.

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Newport.—­The first station after leaving Stafford for Shrewsbury, and immediately after crossing into Shropshire, is a small market town and borough, with a corporation, which can be traced back to Henry iii.  The church, of the fifteenth century, with an interior of great beauty, has been frightfully disfigured by aisles built of bricks in a common builders’ style of architecture.

This corporation offers an example which might be with advantage followed by greater men holding the same office; they have but a small income, and they apply it to keeping in order cisterns and conduits which supply the town with water.

There is a free grammar school founded by one William Adams in 1756, which has a library attached to the school and five scholarships.  The best, of 80 pounds a year, to Christchurch, Oxford.