The Stockton and Darlington Railway is 54 miles long, and its authorised capital was 102,000 pounds—­a modest sum indeed, under 2,000 pounds per mile, less than half the outlay for land alone of the North Midland line and not one twenty-fifth of the average cost of British railways as they stand to-day, which is some 57,000 pounds per mile.  The railway owed its origin to George Stephenson and to Edward Pease, the wealthy Quaker and manufacturer of Darlington, both burly men, strong in mind as body.  The first rail was laid, with much ceremony, near the town of Stockton, on the 23rd of May, 1822, amid great opposition culminating in acts of personal violence, for the early railways, from interests that feared their rivalry, and often from sheer blind ignorance itself, had bitter antagonism to contend with.

The day brought an immense concourse of people to Darlington, all bent on seeing the novel spectacle of a train of carriages and wagons filled with passengers and goods, drawn along a railway by a steam engine.  At eight o’clock in the morning the train started with its load—­22 vehicles—­hauled by Stephenson’s “Locomotion,” driven by Stephenson himself.  “Such was its velocity that in some parts of the journey the speed was frequently 12 miles an hour.”  The number of passengers reached 450, and the goods and merchandise amounted to 90 tons—­a great accomplishment, and George Stephenson and Edward Pease were proud men that day.

Seven years from this present time will witness the Centenary of the railway system.  How shall we celebrate it?  Will railway proprietor, railway director and railway manager on that occasion be animated with the gladness, the pride and the hope that brightened the Jubilee Banquet?  Who can tell?  The future of railways is all uncertain.

A word or two regarding the railway system of Scotland may not be inappropriate.

Scotland has eight working railway companies, England and Wales 104, and Ireland 28.  These include light railways, but are exclusive of all railways, light or ordinary, that are worked not by themselves but by other companies.  Scotland has exhibited her usual good sense, her canny, thrifty way, by keeping the number of operating railway companies within such moderate bounds.  Ireland does not show so well, and England relatively is almost as bad as Ireland, yet England might well have shown the path of prudence to her poorer sister by greater adventure herself in the sensible domain of railway amalgamation.  Much undeserved censure has been heaped upon the Irish lines; sins have been assumed from which they are free, and their virtues have ever been ignored.  John Bright once said that “Railways have rendered more service and received less gratitude than any institution in the land.”  This is certainly true of Ireland, for nothing has ever conferred such benefit upon that country as its railways, and nothing, except perhaps the Government, has received so much abuse.  On this I shall have more to say when I reach the period of the Vice-Regal Commission on Irish Railways, appointed in 1906.