But let us look into this matter a little more closely. On the one hand there is the owner of a property which has been transmitted through a long line of ancestors, and which is now to be intersected and cut up by a projected line of railway. On the other hand there is the company, which cannot progress a step until they have possession of the land. Now let us see what is the nature, and what are the objects of this company. It will not do for Mr Francis or any one else to babble about public advantages, arising from more direct communication between cities or towns of importance. Public advantage may be taken for granted as a result, but upon pure considerations of public advantage no railway whatever was undertaken. It is the commercial speculation of a private company. No man ever took a share in any railway from motives of disinterested philanthropy. He took them because he expected to make a profit by them, to hold them as a safe investment, or finally to sell them for a larger sum than he paid. A condition, and the main one, of the existence of the railway is the possession of the land, and at this point proprietors and speculators join issue. The former do not want the railway. Their wish is to preserve their property undissevered, and to be spared from the spectacle of engines roaring by at all hours of the day and night close to the bottom of the lawn. They very naturally think it a monstrous hardship that the rights of private property should be invaded by private individuals, even though acting upon an incorporated semblance, who are simply seeking their own profit; and they argue that, if the railway was required for public purposes, the government was the proper party to have undertaken its construction. But as, under the existing law, they are liable to be dragged, session after session, into a ruinous expense to oppose the demands of the capitalists, they wisely determine to make the best arrangement they can, and at all events to secure a full remuneration for the sacrifice. So the Squire, finding that the law is so conceived and modified that any one individual who is possessed of landed property may be compelled to surrender it at the demand of a hundred leagued capitalists, makes a virtue of necessity, and demands a sum corresponding in some degree to the extent of the extorted sacrifice: whereupon the promoters of the railway instantly raise such a howl that you would think somebody was trying to rob _them_, or to take _their_ property by force--the case being notoriously the reverse.