our, and to cover at least seventy miles a
day. Little wonder that an eminent Liverpool merchant declared that
only a parcel of charlatans could have devised such a test, and wagered
that if a locomotive ever went ten miles an hour, he {2} would eat a
stewed engine-wheel for breakfast!

The contest had come about as the only solution of a deadlock between
the stubborn directors of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, or
tramway, then under construction, and their still more stubborn
engineer, one George Stephenson. The railway was nearly completed, and
the essential question of the motive power to be used had not yet been
decided. The most conservative authorities thought it best to stick to
the horse; others favoured the use of stationary steam-engines, placed
every mile or two along the route, and hauling the cars from one
station to the next by long ropes; Stephenson, with a few backers,
urged a trial of the locomotive. True, on the Stockton and Darlington
Railway, the first successful public line ever built, opened four years
before, a Travelling Engine, built by the same dogged engineer, had
hauled a train of some forty light carriages nearly nine miles in
sixty-five minutes, and had even beaten a stage-coach, running on the
highway alongside, by a hundred yards in the twelve miles from
Darlington to Stockton. But even here the locomotive was only used to
haul freight; passengers were still carried in old {3} stage-coaches,
which were mounted on special wheels to fit the rails, and were drawn
by horses. The best practical engineers in England, when called into
consultation, inspected the Stockton road, and then advised the
perplexed directors to instal twenty-one stationary engines along the
thirty-one miles of track, rather than to experiment with the new
Travelling Engine.

'What can be more palpably absurd and ridiculous,' the _Quarterly
Review_ had declared in 1825, 'than the prospect held out of
locomotives travelling twice as fast as stage-coaches! We should as
soon expect the people of Woolwich to suffer themselves to be fired off
upon one of Congreve's ricochet rockets as trust themselves to the
mercy of such a machine, going at such a rate.' And the _Quarterly_
was not alone in its scepticism. The directors of the new railway had
found great difficulty in obtaining a charter from parliament--a
difficulty registered in a bill for parliamentary costs reaching
L27,000, or over $4000 a mile. Canal