of other places. What possible benefit can accrue to a town or
neighbourhood near which the railway passes, but where there is no
station? Can it encourage the trade of such a town as Dangley or Standon
to know, that the five or six thousand beings who are whirled past them,
with almost invisible rapidity, every day, arrive in Liverpool in ten
hours after leaving London? On the contrary, is it not found to be
directly injurious to them by the encouragement it gives to towns and
villages more favourably situated; while their inns become deserted, their
tradespeople are drifted out of the great stream of business, their
turn-pikes are ruined, and grass grows in their streets. Let us take any
one of the great lines, and see the number of towns whose ancient
prosperity it has destroyed. From London to York a few years ago, ten or
twelve coaches gave life and animation to all the places they passed
through. Their hotels and commercial rooms were filled at every blowing
of the guard's horn; tradespeople looked out from behind their counters
with a smile, as, with a dart and rattle, the four thoroughbred greys
pulled the well-known fast coach up the street, loaded inside and out.
They became proud of their Tally-ho, or Phenomenon; they got their
newspapers and parcels "with accuracy and despatch," and enjoyed the
natural advantages of their situation. Now the case is altered; a
two-horse coach, or perhaps an omnibus, jumbles occasionally to the
railway station, and the traveller complains that it takes him longer
time to go the ten or twelve miles across the country than all the rest
of the journey. Then he grumbles at the inconvenience of changing his
mode of conveyance, and only revisits the out-of-the-way place when he
cannot avoid it.

A person settling in one of these towns twenty years ago, establishing
trade, buying or building premises, in the belief that, however business
may alter from other causes, his geographical position must, at all
events, continue unchanged, must be as much astonished as was Macbeth at
the migratory propensities of Birnam forest, when he perceives that towns
a hundred miles down the road have actually walked between him and London;
get their town parcels much earlier, and have digested and nearly
forgotten their newspaper, while he is waiting in a fever of expectation
to know whether rums is much riz or sugars is greatly fell. He calls for a
branch railway to put him on equal terms; but a vast