proprietors and toll-road
companies had declaimed against the attack on vested rights. Country
squires had spluttered over the damage to fox covers. Horses could not
plough in neighbouring fields. {4} Widows' strawberry-beds would be
ruined. What would become of coachmen and coach-builders and
horse-dealers? 'Or suppose a cow were to stray upon the line; would
not that be a very awkward circumstance?' queried a committee member,
only to give Stephenson an opening for the classic reply in his slow
Northumbrian speech: 'Ay, verra awkward for the coo.' And not only
would the locomotive as it shot along do such varied damage; in truth,
it would not go at all; the wheels, declared eminent experts, would not
grip on the smooth rails, or else the engines would prove top-heavy.

To decide the matter, the directors had offered the prize which brought
together the _Novelty_, the _Sans-pareil_, the _Rocket_, and the
_Perseverance_, engines which would look almost as strange to a modern
crowd as they did to the thousands of spectators drawn up along the
track on that momentous morning. The contest was soon decided. The
_Novelty_, an ingenious engine but not substantially built, broke down
twice. The _Sans-pareil_ proved wasteful of coal and also met with an
accident. The _Perseverance_, for all its efforts, could do no better
than five or six miles an hour. The _Rocket_ alone met all
requirements. In a {5} seventy-mile run it averaged fifteen miles an
hour and reached a maximum of twenty-nine. Years afterwards, when
scrapped to a colliery, the veteran engine was still able, in an
emergency, to make four miles in four and a half minutes. 'Truly,'
declared Cropper, one of the directors who had stood out for the
stationary engine and the miles of rope, 'now has George Stephenson at
last delivered himself.'

Stephenson had the good fortune, he had earned it indeed, to put the
top brick on the wall, and he alone lives in popular memory. But the
railway, like most other great inventions, came about by the toil of
hundreds of known and unknown workers, each adding his little or great
advance, until at last some genius or some plodder, standing on their
failures, could reach success. Both the characteristic features of the
modern railway, the iron road and the steam motive power, developed
gradually as necessity urged and groping experiment permitted.

The iron road came first. When men began to mine coal in the north