A storm of execration—'Coquin! voleur! scélérat!' burst forth at this confession, received by Derville with a defiant scowl, as he stalked out of the apartment.
I do not know that any law-proceedings were afterwards taken against him for defamation of character. Hector kept the note, as indeed he had a good right to do, and Monsieur and Madams Bertrand are still prosperous and respected inhabitants of Rouen, from which city Derville disappeared very soon after the incidents just related.
CHEAP MINOR RAILWAYS.
'On the day that our preamble was proved, we had all a famous dinner at three guineas a head—never saw such a splendid set-out in my life! each of us had a printed bill of fare laid beside his plate; and I brought it home as quite a curiosity in the way of eating!' Such was the account lately given us by a railway projector of that memorable year of frenzy, 1845. A party of committee-men, agents, engineers, and solicitors, had, in their exuberance of cash, dined at a cost of some sixty guineas—a trifle added to the general bill of charges, and of course not worth thinking of by the shareholders.
These days of dining at three guineas a head for the good of railway undertakings are pretty well gone; and agents and counsel may well sigh over the recollection of doings probably never to return.
'The truth is, we were all mad in those times,' added the individual who owned so candidly to the three-guinea dinner. And this is the only feasible way of accounting for the wild speculations of seven years ago. There was a universal craze. All hastened to be rich on the convenient principle of overreaching their neighbours. There was robbery throughout. Engineers, landholders, law-agents, and jobbers, pocketed their respective booties, and it is needless to say who were left to suffer.
Looking at the catastrophe, the subject of railway mismanagement is somewhat too serious for a joke, and we have only drawn attention for an instant to the errors of the past in order to draw a warning for the future. It must ever be lamented that the introduction of so stupendous and useful a thing as locomotion by rail, should have become the occasion of such widespread cupidity and folly; for scarcely ever had science offered a more gracious boon to mankind. It is charitable to think that the foundation of the great error that was committed, lay in a miscalculation as to the relation between expenditure and returns. We can suppose that there was a certain faith in the potency of money. To spend so much, was to bring back so much; and it became an agreeable delusion, that the more was spent, the greater was to be the revenue. Unfortunately, it does not seem to have occurred to any one of the parties concerned, that all depends on how money is spent. There are tradesmen, we imagine, who know to their cost, that it is quite within the bounds of possibility to have the whole of their profits swept away by rent and taxes. Curious, that this plain and unpleasant and very possible result did not dawn on the minds of the great railway interests. And yet, how grave and calculating the mighty dons of the new system of locomotion—men who passed themselves off as up to anything!
Wonderfully acute secretaries; highly-polished chairmen; directors disdainful of ordinary ways of transacting business. A mystery made of the most common-place affairs! We may be thankful that the world has at last seen through these pretenders to superhuman sagacity. With but remarkably few exceptions, the great railway men of the time have committed the grossest blunders; and the stupidest blunder of all, has been the confounding of proper and improper expenditure; just as if a shopkeeper were to fall into the unhappy error of imagining that his returns were to be in the ratio, not of the business he was to do, but of his private and unauthorised expenses.