year the Liverpool and Manchester Bill was carried, and in
1830 the career of the civilizing locomotive commenced, but it took many more
years to convince "Practical men" that the Railway would successfully compete
with the Coach and Canal.

When, in 1831, the scheme of a Railway between London and Birmingham was made
public, a very clever pamphlet appeared under the title of "Beware the
Bubbles," in which we find the following comical prognostications of the
results of Railways:--

"After all, what advantage does the London and Birmingham Railway hold out?
Only one,--celerity of motion; and, after all, the ten miles an hour is
absolutely slower than the coaches, some of which go as fast as eleven or
twelve miles an hour; and, with the length of time that the engine and its
cumbrous train requires ere it can stop, and the other contingencies, there
would be little difference in the time of a twelve miles an hour coach and a
fifteen miles an hour engine, supposing twenty or thirty stoppages, to pick
up little parcels, between London and Birmingham. The conveyance is not so
safe as by coach."

After enumerating a series of theoretical dangers, he proceeds. "Another
consideration, which would deter invalids, ladies, and children from making
use of the Railway, would be want of accommodation along the line, unless the
Directors of the Railway chose to build inns at their own expense. But those
inns the Directors would have, in great part, to support, because they would
be out of the way of any business except that arising from the Railway, and
that would be trifling. Commercial travellers would never, by any chance, go
by the Railroad. The occasional traveller, who went the same route for
pleasure, would go by the coach-road also, because of the cheerful company
and comfortable dinner.

"Not one of the nobility, the gentry, or those who travel in their own
carriages, would really like to be drawn at the tail of a train of waggons,
in which some hundreds of bars of iron were jingling with a noise that would
drown all the bells of the district, and in momentary apprehension of having
his vehicle broken to pieces, and himself killed or crippled by the collision
of those thirty-two ton masses. Even if a man had no carriage of his own,
what inducement could he have to take so ungainly a conveyance. Three hours
is more than the maximum difference by which the ordinary speed of coaches
could be exceeded; and it is not one