The Sun.
London, England, 1850-09-18 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

BLACK'S PICTURESQUE TOURIST OF
ENGLAND AND WALES. Second Edition.
The peculiar excelierxe of At2ssrs. Black's Guide
Books is so well known as to render commendation

almost superfluous. Oae of the most excellent and
most useful of a very excellent and useful series has,
we are in nowise surprised to find, already reached a
second edition. No traveller—and in these days of
rapid locomotion the term is almost one of universal
application—should be unprovided with this most
agreeable companion and most serviceable guide.
Whatsoever his route, within the limits of England
and %Vales, he will here find a map of the country to
be passed through with beautiful engravings of the
surrounding scenery and memorable places, together
with a very comprehensive and most convenient chart
of the road or railroad by which he is to travel. This
chart is drawn out on the plan of Paterson's cele-
brated Road Book. The pages of this chart are di-
vided into three column=. The central column con-
tains an enumeration of the places passed through by
the railroad ; and more than this, every bridge, tun-
nel, viaduct, &c., is not merely named, but its mea-
surement and peculiarities are particularised. The
outer columns describe the country on either hand ;
thus in fancy the reader of " The Guide" passes
along the middle line, and notices in rotation every
town, village, and country-seat on either hand. In
addition to this very comprehensive chart, the volume
is abundantly provided with travelling maps. To
many persons the most interesting, as well as most
useful portion of " The Guide," consists of its histo-
rical, geographical, and political descriptions of the
principal towns of England, as a specimen of which
we may quote the following:—

WEDNESDAY EVENING, SEPTEMBER 18, 1850.

his own 50,000/. ; but if he had done this, Thompson
and Forman could not have supplied the railway, and
they would have been driven to obtain it at a higher
price, Mr. Hudson, therefore, said to Tnompson and
Forman, " Keep your engagement with the railway
company, but you must at least partially fulfil your
contract with me, and on 7,000 tons you must pay
me the difference between 61. 103. and the present
market price. To this, by all mercantile usage, he
was clearly entitled. It is difficult to see what pos-
sible imputation can rest upon Mr. Hudson in this
transaction. We assume that the facts are truly
stated in the evidence, as we apprehend there can
be no doubt. Most of our readers will probably
agree with the Learned Judge who tried this
case, that of this the most perfect explanation has
been afforded. No one in his senses will say that
Mr. Hudson was under the slightest obligation to
give the Berwick Railway the benefit of his own pri-
vate speculation—a speculation which, if it had turned
out a losing one, he, and he alone, must have borne
the loss. The railway company purchased their iron
at the fair market price of the day on which they
bought it. Mr. Hudson made nothing more in con-
sequence of the sale to them than he would if it had
been effected by Thompson and Forman to any other
purchaser. It appears, indeed, that he made less.
It is impossible for us to forget that this very iron
transaction has been made the means of exciting more
prejudice against Mr. Hudson than perhaps any other
act of his life—that it is that upon which those who
accuse him of malversation have most frequently and
most constantly relied. That the facts are truly.stated:in
the evidence we have quoted, no controversy whatever
has been raised. If he can as satisfactorily answer
every other charge against him, there are few who
will give him a fair hearing who will not admit that
he has been; in the words we have quoted from the
preface to the pamphlet, " a deeply injured man."
STANDARD.—A pamphlet has been published
within the last few days which will, we doubt not,
have the effect of recalling public attention to a sub-
ject to which, in this publication, it is distinctly
challenged by the friends of the party most inter-
ested in the result. It appears that at the last York-
shire assizes Mr. George Hudson—better known by
his former title of the Railway King—was produced
as a witness in a libel case, to sustain a plea of j us-
tification, grounded on his own alleged misconduct
in the management of those railway companies
which for so many years he governed with absolute
sway. A witness thus produced to give evidence in
fact in his own condemnation is, we need scarcely
tell our readers, treated with all the searching severity
of a cross-examination by the party producing him ;
and when we say that Mr. Sergeant Wilkins was the
counsel, to whose lot it fell to put Mr. Hudson " to
the question," we give the best assurance that every-
thing was done that skill and power could effect to
extort from the questioned the anticipated confession
of guilt. The evidence of Mr. Hudson has been

deemed so satisfactory by his friends that they have
published it for circulation in a separate shape.
It is but justice to Mr. Hudson to say that even
the skill of Mr. Sergeant Wilkins failed to establish
out of his own lips any case of malversation against
him. On the contrary, the examination elicited in
many instances complete and satisfactory explanations
of some of the transactions in relation to which much
obloquy has been cast upon him. The effect of the
evidence upon the bystanders may, perhaps, be best
expressed in the phrase used by a member of the
Northern circuit, a Member of Parliament, not one of
the counsel engaged in the case. This gentleman,
not much predisposed in Mr. Hudson's favour, either
by political or Parliamentary recollections, when
asked what he thought of the evidence of Mr.
Hudson, replied, that " he never saw so much dirt
wiped off any one in the same space of time." To
fling that dirt upon Mr. Hudson appears to have
been almost the amusement of some parties for the
last two years. No epithet was too strong to apply
to him ; no condemnation too severe to pro-
nounce upon his conduct generally. The essence of
all railway frauds appeared to be supposed to be con-
centrated in his conduct. That he was guilty of
peculation, misrepresentation, almost embezzlement,
appeared to be assumed as axioms of railway science.
Those, indeed, who like ourselves are unwilling to
condemn any one upon mere general abuse, looked
sometimes for tangible and specific charges to justify
this wholesale condemnation. One or ,two instances
however of assumed misconduct, vaguely but posi-
tively stated, were always at hand to answer this
demand. Mr. Hudson, too, and his friends appeared
to let judgment go by default. If the charges were
general, they seemed to be acquiesced in ; and public
opinion accepted as proved the very vaguest accusa-
tions, which there seemed no vigorous effort to
refute and scarcely to deny. There was, indeed,
one point which, throughout the entire of
the fierce storm of popular odium that raged
against him, ought to have to any mind sug-
gested reflections strongly in his favour. He con-
tinued under all these accusations a Member of the

House of Commons. If one-half, or anything like
one-half, of the vituperations heaped upon him was
deserved, he richly merited expulsion from that
House. Those Members of the Lower House of Par-

Figment who were implicated in the South Sea scheme
were expelled the House of Commons in the days
even of Sir Robert Walpole. If Mr. Hudson had
been implicated in railway frauds, it was due, even to
the House of Commons itself, not to permit him to
hold his seat. His accusers, too, were men of influence—
.

,
a petition to the House of Commons would have insured

an inquiry into his alleged misconduct. But at the bar of
that House he must have been heard in his own defence.
Facts alone would there have sustained accusa-
tions; and when we found this plain and obvious
course not resorted to—the course which, if his ac-
cusers really believed their charges to the extent to
which they made them, they were bound to pursue—
we confess we thought the system of general vitupe-
ration and newspaper abuse by which it was sought
to run down Mr. Hudson, by which unquestionably
a formidable amount of popular odium was excited
against him, unfair, unmanly, and unjust. Those
who will take the trouble of remembering the extra-
vagant hopes of the age of railway speculation, and
the reverse in which those hopes were doomed to
disappointment, will not wonder if the unlucky
speculators found themselves in a mood of
mind in which it was a relief to them to discover
any object, animate or inanimate, upon which
to vent their rage. Men rushed upon the purchase
of scrip, in the belief that they were grasping
princely fortunes, and awoke from their dream of un-
told wealth, to find themselves ruined. The instinct
of human nature was to seek any object upon which
to shift the blame from their own folly. Hudson be-
came the scapegoat upon whom every man laid the
sins of his own imprudent avarice. There is no
animal so unreasoning as the disappointed gambler,
and gamblers the greater number of dealers in rail-
way shares unquestionably were. Mr. Hudson was
the most prominent object connected with the system
against which they had wrecked themselves—cursing
the whole railway kingdom, they almost of necessity
directed their imprecations against the Railway King.
It was this temper of the public mind that made it
so easy to excite against Mr. Hudson a storm of
popular odium. To men smarting from their losses,
to prefer an accusation was equivalent to proving it.
To ask of such men to pause to investigate was an
insult ; they knew that they had lost, where they
thought to make, fortunes. This must have occurred
by fraud, this was enough to sustain any charge,
especially against any man who had speculated mere
luckily than themselves. There was added to this,
too, much of that vulgar passion that cannot brook
the prosperity of others—the desire to pull dowel
whatever is above themselves that marks the Liberal
school of the present age. Men were envious of the
supposed greatness of the aristocratic associates of the
self-elevated Yorkshireman. Multitudes were, from
this motive only, ready to exult over his fall. It is
debasing to human nature to acknowledge the general
existence of such a motive; but that it does exist we
have had too many painful proofs. It was, after all,
however different the manifestation, the same vulgar
and malignant intolerance of the prosperity of others
that could gloat over the dismantling of Stowe, and
hunt down the deposed monarch of the railway throne.
Besides, it was but too manifest that political motives
contributed largely to swell the tide of obloquy that
set in so rapidly and so strong. Mr. Hudson had
been for years an active and consistent Conservative.
He had been faithful in the great defection. He had

given to the enemies of the Protectionist cause addi-
tional reason for hating him in the fact tbat he was
the personal friend of one whom meanness and trick-
ery instinctively, and by the necessities of nature,
hated and feared. We confess that the knowledge
that, up to the last moment of the life of Lord George
Bentinck, Mr. Hudson had enjoyed the confidence and
friendship of that great and good man, had we no other
reason, would have compelled us to refuse credence to
the unproved accusations by which he was so unspar-
ingly assailed. We confess, then, we were pleased
when at last in this trial at York we had the oppor-
tunity of grappling with some definite and specific
issue. Our readers who peruse this pamphlet report
of the evidence, will probably share our surprise at
discovering the character of the charges upon which,
when reduced to matter of precise fact, all the vitu-
peration of Mr. Hudson appears to rest., We must
content ourselves for the present by referring our
readers to the report of the evidence itself. We
can only give our opinion upon those charges
that were made the subject of Mr. Sergeant Wil-
kins's cross-examination. We have no sympathy
with Mr. Hudson beyond that produced by the
belief that in the mode by which he has been
assailed he has been unfairly and intemperately run
down. There may be, for aught we know, transac-
tions not alluded to at this trial, which may furnish
matter of grave impeachment ; we have no reason on
the other hand to believe that there are. All the pro-
babilities are that his accusers selected those matters

upon which they could best rest their charges against
him. Upon these he has given his sworn answer, in