“But the probability is that canals would reduce their rates one-half; and thus, competing wholesomely, extinguish the railway.  The coach-masters would do the same thing—­run for twelve months at half the present fares, and then not one man in his senses would risk his bones on the railway.  The innkeepers would follow a course precisely similar, and give nice smoking dinners, foaming tankards and bottles of beeswing at so cheap a rate, and meet their customers with so good humoured faces, and do so many of those kind offices that legions would flock to the hospitable road.  And while all this was going on, and the thousands of men which the authors of this ridiculous scheme had expected to send upon the parish were thriving, the solitary stranger who had nobody to tell him better would go swinging at the tail of the engine, bumping first on the iron plates on this side and then on the iron plates on that side; and if he escaped being scalded to death by the bursting of his engine, or having all his bones broken by collision with another, he would be fain to rest for the night within some four bare walls and gnaw a mouldy crust which he brought in his pocket, or, as an alternative of luxury, wade some ten miles through the mire, and feast upon a rasher of rusty bacon and a tankard of the smallest ale at the nearest hedge alehouse.”

All this now sounds inexpressibly droll, and yet this prophet of evil was not entirely wrong; nay, in some important particulars he was more right than the railway promoters, whom he so heartily detested.  The railway did cost nearly seven millions instead of four millions as calculated by the projectors, and the cost of working before the amalgamation with the Grand Junction did amount to 380,000 pounds per annum:  two figure facts which would have effectually crushed speculation could they have been proved in 1831; but then the per contra of traffic was equally astounding in its overflow, instead of one-third of the existing traffic, or 126,780 pounds a-year allowed by the pamphleteer, the London and Birmingham earned a gross revenue of nearly 900,000 pounds, while still leaving a traffic in heavy goods on the canals sufficient to pay from 6 to 30 pounds per cent. to the proprietors, in spite of a reduction of rates of upwards of 50 pounds per cent.  Indeed this traffic actually increased on the Grand Junction Canal, since the opening of the Birmingham Railway, from 750,000 pounds in 1836, to 1,160,000 pounds in 1847.

Perhaps on no point would the expectation of the most sanguine among the early projectors of railways been more satisfactorily exceeded than in regard to safety.  Swiftness, and cheapness, and power, acute intelligent engineers foresaw; but that millions of passengers should be whirled along at a speed varying from twenty to fifty miles an hour with more safety than they could have secured by walking a-foot, would have seemed an anticipation of the very wildest character.  Yet such is the case.  In 1850, upwards of seventy millions of souls were conveyed by railway; when eleven passengers were killed and fifty-four injured, or less than one to each million of passengers conveyed.