2 AUGUST 1845, Page 12

RAILWAY SPECULATION FOR THE MILLION. Tntrrn is stranger than fiction

: the revelations made to the Com- mittee on the Dublin and Galway Railway are more grotesque than the broadest farce, and more immoral than a modern French novel. They present at once a passionate exaggeration of the mania of railway speculation and a burlesque on it. In the office, the crowd of subscribers for " scrip " fight for the possession of the desk. The shareholders are shopboys, who have just ex- changed the jacket for the coat—paralytic inmates of almshouses, who can neither read nor write—butlers out of place—" ladies" who when sought are not to be found, or their houses either. All sorts of tricks are practised, that these capitalists of straw may have the appearance of possessing a domicile. The Charter- house pensioner directs that his letters may be addressed to the residence of a relative in the country, to whom in his capacity of "poor relation" he pays visits once or twice in the year. The shopboy requests as a favour that the baker with whom he deals for buns will allow his letters to be addressed to his shop. Others, who have not even this distant and precarious connexion with a respectable locality, make the post-office their innocent accom- plice: letters are ordered ta be addressed to them at places where they have never been and never expect to be, and then the post- masters receive orders to readdress those letters to some rendez- vous in London. And if the searching scrutiny of Mr. Croucher were brought to bear upon other railway companies of how many would the Dublin and Galway: be found the exact companies, In all this, doubtless, there is much downright swindling. The " ladies " and gentlemen to be found nowhere are unquestionably fictitious beings, in whose name the real jugglers act. The old crone of the workhouse, bed-rid and ignorant, can only be a tool in the hands of some sharper. But the servants out of place, and above all the shopboys, may be conceived to have caught the in- fection of speculation and to be dabbling in Railway 'scrip" on their own account. The idea of growing rich by obtaining "shares" and disposing of them at a premium before a call is made, is level to the meanest capacity, and exceedingly tempting. Persons as unlikely are known to have made fortunes (and lost them) in Law's Mississippi and our own precious South Sea bubble. It is with share-gambling as with gambling on the turf: while the gentleman is betting his guineas in the room at Tattersalis, the groom or tiger is betting pots of beer at the tap ; and the serving- man can "make a book ', as well as his master. And thus, while great stakes are played for by Members of Parliament, holders of offices under Government, &c. in the Share-market, shopboys and servants out of place have their little goes—their Derby clubs as it were—in which they gamble on a more limited scale. With those who regard poverty as sinful and shameful on its own account, speculation in shares is a moral pool of Bethesda, in which those of all ranks who halt upon this leg may jostle for precedence. This universal diffusion of the speculating mania is not its least alarming symptom. All ages and all classes are corrupted. Mere children are initiated into the practice of swindling, along with the mystery of sweeping a shop, delivering parcels, or making entries in a day-book. Railway schemes become normal schools to train members for Lord Stanley's projected penal colonies. Sufficient capital to set up as a jobber in railway shares is easily obtained. A few weeks ago, a respectable news-agent brought two or three of his boys before the Police Magistrate for systematically retaining money for papers never purchased : the few pounds thus dishonestly made by each of these lads were

i capital enough to set him up n this line of business. As "deep calls aloud unto deep," so one act of furtive and dishonest gambling, by leading to another, soon floods the whole mind and washes out all trace of better _principles. Gambling in shares is an entrance to a career of iniquity as patent to the potboy as to the Member of Parliament. The moral leprosy is spreading its thick scurf over the whole of society.

Even the cockpit has—or had—its penal code. The very brutes who gamble in animal suffering are taught by the neces- sity of self-defence that some acts of dishonesty must be punished. The shadow on the floor in Hogarth's cockpit reminds us that the fellow who took a bet when he had no money to pay with was hoisted to the roof in a basket. There is no shame in taking a useful hint even from cockfighters. Perhaps some check might be imposed on the growing evil of gambling in shares, by im- posing penalties—fines, or, if unable to pay, the tread-mill—on all defaulters who cannot prove that when they purchased their shares they were actually in possession of money enough to meet the "calls," or had reasonable grounds to expect that they would be in possession of it when the term arrived.