to him in a very bad way; her railways, her trade, her shipping, all the apparatus of her commerce, was haphazard, unconcentrated, uneconomical, just like her mode of making repairs to her streets. Personally, except that at this moment his motor was stopped, he did not at all object to it, since it gave him the opportunity which he had been preparing for of stepping in in the matter of her railways, and introducing American methods. He had, now three months ago, got through his Bill for a direct railway between Liverpool and Southampton, and the work of construction was going on with a speed that fairly took away the breath of contractors who were accustomed to think that slowness was essential to solidity. That boast of solidity, so characteristic of the English, had long amused Lewis Palmer.
' What they call solid,' he had once said to Bilton, ' I call stodgy. They make a brick wall three feet thick, that would bear the weight of the world, when all they want is a two-inch steel girder riveted to an upright. And when they have spent a couple of months in building it, they think they have done better than the man who puts up the steel girder. It is false economy to put up what is not necessary, just as it is false economy not to put up what is. And they think that to paper their railroad cars with looking-glasses in gold frames will console the shareholders for an absence of dividends. No, before we financed the Liverpool and Southampton we made certain of getting the line built the proper way.'
But this line was by no means all the control he meant to get in English railways. Its success, his financial knowledge told him, was certain; it was as sure that the traffic between the ports would come by a directer and faster route than that which already existed as that the sun would rise to-morrow; it was equally sure that facility of communication would lead to increased traffic. What fol-
