Page:The Working and Management of an English Railway.djvu/20

 were opened wide and the era of railways had commenced.

About the year 1820, the relations between Manchester, as the great manufacturing town of the north, and Liverpool, as the nearest shipping port, had created a large traffic between the two places, for the conduct of which the road waggons and canal barges had proved to be totally inadequate. In the year 1821, therefore, a committee of merchants of Liverpool was formed to draw up a scheme for the construction of a railway or tramway between Liverpool and Manchester, the question of the motive power to be employed being left for a time an open one as between horses and the steam engine, with which Mr George Stephenson was then experimenting. There was no idea at first of conveying passengers, but the scheme grew in importance as time went on, until at length it aroused a perfect storm of enthusiasm on the one side and of embittered opposition on the other. Much has been said and written as to the incredible lengths to which that opposition was carried by the enemies of the undertaking, and the story is one not without its painful, as well as its ludicrous, features, but it need not here be enlarged upon. Suffice it to say that every weapon that the prejudice and narrow-mindedness of the many, or the alarmed avarice of the few, whose interests were threatened by the impending change, could devise was brought to bear without scruple, even to the length of personal abuse and calumny levelled against the promoters. The most absurd statements were gravely put forward and believed in; the smoke of the engines would kill the birds, cattle would be terrified, and cows would cease to give their milk; the sparks from the