When this sober state of things had endured some time, there came a year that money was loose, and a speculative fever due in the whirligig of time. Then railways bubbled. New ones were advertised, fifty a month, and all went to a premium. High and low scrambled for the shares, even when the projected line was to run from the town of Nought to the village of Nothing across a goose common. The flame spread, fanned by prospectus and advertisement, two mines of glowing fiction, compared with which the legitimate article is a mere tissue of understatements; princes sat in railway tenders, and clove the air like the birds whose effigies surmount their armorials; our stiffest Peers relaxed into Boards; Bishops warned their clergy against avarice, and buttered Hudson an inch thick for shares; and turned their little aprons into great pockets; men, stainless hitherto, put down their infants, nurses included, as independent subscribers, and bagged the coupons, _capturi tartaros._ Nearly everything that had a name, and, by some immense fortuity, could write it, demanded its part in the new and fathomless source of wealth: a charwoman's two sons were living in a garret on fifteen shillings apiece per week; down went their excellencies' names for L. 37,000 worth of bubbling iron; another shareholder applied imperiously from a house in Grosvenor Square; he had breakfasted on the steps. Once more in Time's whirligig gentlemen and their footmen jostled one another on the Exchange, and a motley crew of peers and printers, vicars and admirals, professors, cooks, costermongers, cotton-spinners, waiters, coachmen, priests, potboys, hankers, braziers, dairymen, mail-guards, barristers, spinsters, butchers, beggars, duchesses, rag-merchants--in one word, of Nobs and Snobs; fought and scrambled pell mell for the popular paper, and all to get rich in a day.*
*For the humours of the time see the parliamentary return of Railway Subscribers, published 1846: Francis's British Railway: Evan's Commercial Crisis; and the pamphlets and journals of the day.
Richard Hardie had some money in existing railways, but he declined to invest his hard cash upon hypotheticals. He was repeatedly solicited to be a director, but always declined. Once he was offered a canny bribe of a thousand pounds to let his name go on a provisional committee. He refused with a characteristic remark: “I never buy any merchandise at a fancy price, not even hard cash.”