our forges and factories, which illumine our houses and streets by night, which warm our habitations, and which supply fuel to our ocean steamers, as well as to our railway locomotives. No other agency could whirl those millions of spindles, and drive those thousands of looms, the mere tendance on which now occupies nearly a million of artisans. No other known power could have enabled our iron workers to roll the rails of which we have laid so many thousands of miles, or to give motion to the powerful and accurate machines which are needful for the construction of the locomotive itself. Our railways not only give a powerful stimulus to industry, and form an indispensable element of national welfare, but they also constitute a department of mechanical science which is intimately connected with every other branch of industry. While the actual state of our manufacturing and commercial activity would have been impossible without our railways, our railways could never have existed but for our manufacturing and commercial activity.

There is, however, one important particular in which the advantage offered to mankind by the application of thermal force to locomotive transport differs from the advantages derived from the establishment of stationary factories. Multiplication of work is the result of mechanical invention. Speed, indeed, is one of the elements of this multiplication; but speed in this instance has chiefly an economic value. A machine driven at a given speed will turn out, other things being alike, twice as much work as a similar machine driven at half the speed. Thus in many instances, especially in printing machines, speed is an object of primary importance.

In the conveyance of passengers, however, the effect of speed assumes another aspect. We have to look not only at the mechanical work done by the locomotive, but at the manual and intellectual work for which time is gained for the traveller by its speed. The rapidity of inland travel is now from four to five times as great as that which the utmost appliances at the command of wealth could secure to our grandfathers. To the poorer classes the gain is more than double that which has been afforded to the former occupants of the travelling carriage, the postchaise, and the fast coach. The effect of this gain in time is an equivalent lengthening of the term of human life; an added time that is, for the most part, actively employed. No doubt much more time is now occupied by individuals in travelling than was formerly the case. But each journey has its definite object, of business or of pleasure. Work, which before needed twice or thrice the

length of an ordinary lifetime, and therefore the services of two or three individuals, to execute, can now be performed by one man. This advantage is especially enjoyed by the most skilful. The great surgeon can give the service of his eye and hand to save valuable life, at a moment's call and at fifty or a hundred miles' distance, and yet return to his wonted scene of duty so rapidly that none of his patients need materially suffer by delay. The statesman can settle, by an hour's conversation, matters that might have taken months of diplomatic correspondence only to embroil, almost before his absence from his office is remarked by his subordinates. Similar cases are of almost daily occurrence. The gain thus secured to mankind by this addition to the utilisable period of the life of its chief and most costly workers, it is not easy to calculate.

The speed which could be maintained in travelling in England in the year 1830 depended mainly on the previous adoption of three mechanical inventions; namely, the shoeing of horses, the application of steel springs to carriages, and the formation of roads of a homogeneous surface. The date of the first of these great discoveries is prehistoric. The term ironfooted, indeed, we have not found applied to the horse earlier than by Nonnius, in the fifth century of our era. But the expression brazen-footed' occurs in two places in the Iliad,' and intimates the fact that horses were shod with bronze at a time when iron was unknown, or at least when it was extremely precious. The term brazen-stamping horses' also occurs in the Knights' of Aristophanes. The introduction of springs, the construction of which has been much modified during the present, dates during the eighteenth, century. Carriages are to be seen in the South Kensington Museum, not older than 1730 or 1740 in their build, in which a sedan-like body is suspended from wooden bearers by leather straps. As to the roadway, its excellence in this country is due to Mr. MacAdam. The breccia roads of Italy are said to be of old date. They are certainly of indisputable excellence. But the Via Appia, from Rome to Puteoli, was paved with large squares of lava or of limestone. The streets of Pompeii were paved with blocks of lava, as are those of Naples at the present day. The Roman roads in the provinces were built of boulders, or large pebbles, wedged between a line of squared stones firmly set on either side, and a centre line of the same kind by way of key. In some of the provincial roads of Eng† Il. viii. 41; xiii. 23.

Nonn. D. 29, 206.

‡ Ar. Eq. 552.

land in which the traffic was heaviest, as for example on that from Manchester to Sheffield, a track was pitched with small granite blocks, such as are still used in some of the streets of London. But throughout the country in general, before the introduction of the MacAdam system, the roads were rough. tracks, spread with large pebbles, and intersected with deep ruts. In the year 1830, from seven and a half to eight miles an hour was a fair stage-coach speed. Ten and a half and eleven and a half miles per hour were attained by the Quick'silver' mails to Devonshire; and the Shrewsbury coaches, the 'Hirondelle' and Hibernia,' travelled over a portion of their route at the considerable speed of sixteen miles an hour, including the time necessary for changing horses.

6

6

The speed of railway transit, in its turn, is mainly due to three mechanical improvements. Of these, the first is the combination of the edge rail with the flanged wheel, and the length and solidity given to the rails. In the early tramways, cast-iron L-shaped plates were employed to support narrow iron wheels. The plates were only one yard in length, bedded on stout blocks; and more or less shock was given to the wheels on passing over every joint. The second discovery was that of the adhesion between a smooth wheel and a smooth rail-a fact which was unsuspected by the earliest inventors, although it amounts to from three-tenths to three-eighths of the weight incumbent on the wheels. The third element of speed was the use of the blast-a method of procuring draught through the furnace which had been patented by Nicholson in 1806, and which proved the very soul of the locomotive engine. In making some repairs and alterations in the Rocket,' the successful competitor for the prize offered in 1829 by the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Company for the best locomotive, Mr. Stephenson tried the expedient of turning the waste steam from the cylinders, which on the first trial was allowed to escape directly into the air, into the chimney of the locomotive. The rapid rush of air, drawn through the furnace by the vacuum caused by the steam, proved to be a means of generating heat with speed proportionate to that of the revolution of the wheels. The limitation of speed, from the time of this discovery, became a question not of a mechanical, but of an economical nature. The velocity of seventy miles per hour, which is equal to that of a swift on the wing, was obtained by Mr. Brunel on portions of the Great Western line. Our actual speeds are far within the limit of our mechanical power. The run from London to Edinburgh is accomplished, by the most rapid trains, in 9 hours, or at the rate of 40 miles an hour.

The 117 miles from London to Bristol are averaged in 156 minutes, or at the rate of a mile in a minute and a third. The most rapid travelling in France is tabulated by M. de Franqueville as occurring on the 141 miles from Paris to Havre, and is at the rate of 30 miles an hour; while on the 536 miles from Paris to Marseilles, the run occupies 16 hours for the fastest trains, and 29 hours for the slow trains.*

The elbow-room given to the working population of England, by increased velocity of transport, is one of the main causes of the immense increase of our national prosperity following the introduction of the railway system. No one doubts the effect produced by increased facility of internal communication on industry. But it may prove interesting to attempt an estimate of the gain, which, though only roughly approximate, is none the less instructive, and even startling.

Captain Tyler reports the number of individual passenger journeys on the railways of the United Kingdom in 1873 to have been 455,320,188. An addition to this figure has to be made to account for the journeys of season-ticket holders, which will bring up the aggregate to some 553 millions of passenger journeys. The average length of journey is not given by Captain Tyler. But from a comparison of the passenger receipts with the average rate of fares we are led to estimate this average length at from nine to ten miles. The great bulk of railway passengers now travel by third-class carriages, and thus represent the waggon and cart, and the pedestrian, travellers of the days of coaching; while the first and second-class passengers may be compared with those who formerly made use of private carriages, postchaises, and fast coaches. We shall be far within the mark in assuming that each of these individual journeys has been performed in onefourth of the time that would have been possible in the absence of railways. Of course the mere number of journeys, irrespective of their rapidity, would have been inconsistent with our industrial condition half a century ago. The increase of speed is one of the elements which have rendered possible the actual number of journeys now taken, with which, as a fact, we have to deal.

If we allow, then, that in each passenger journey taken on our railways in the past year, forty minutes' less time has been occupied than would have been consumed in the performance of such journey by the old methods, the aggregate of time thus calculated is somewhat more than 1,500,000 years, allowing a

* Du Régime des Travaux Publics, tome ii. P. 424.

working year to consist of 300 days of eight hours a piece. The total number of persons occupied in professions, industry, and commerce in England is returned, in the census of 1871, as 6,637,331 persons. The returns from passenger traffic in England are something more than 85 per cent. of the total passenger income from the railways of the United Kingdom. This gives a relative aggregate of 1,275,000 years for the gain of England alone, which is equivalent to an addition of rather more than one-fifth to the working time of each industrial individual. Thus as far as the time actually occupied in travelling is an indication of the useful occupation of the productive classes in England, one-fifth has been added to the economic power of our population by the use of railways for passenger traffic; a fact which may very well allow a very wide margin for travelling merely for luxury or for amusement. We may compare the result thus obtained with indications furnished from another source. One immediate result of the opening of any trunk line of railway has been the stoppage of the long coaching traffic on the parallel lines of road. We are able to form some idea of the proportion of road traffic thus extinguished, or rather transferred, by the return of the tolls. The toll income of the turnpike trusts has the advantage of measuring the proportionate traffic with great exactitude; and it further indicates, at all events approximately, the cost of maintenance and repairs. The proportion between the maintenance of way and the other items of the cost of highway traffic is not a point as to which much definite information is accessible. But it is well known to mechanics that a considerable analogy exists in the distribution of stress, and thus in the distribution of cost, under different systems, adopted for the performance of similar duties. The proportion of the cost of maintenance of way to that of the other elements of railway expenditure is almost exactly one-fifth. Five times the amount. of the tolls, therefore, may give an approximate idea of the sums annually laid out in travelling over any given district. The coincidence between the figures thus obtained and those which have been adopted, as we shall presently see, by a French writer, is such as to show that the estimate is not very wide of the mark.

*

In the twenty years from 1837 to 1857 the tolls of the turnpike roads of England and Wales fell off by 40 per cent.; that is to say, from 1,509,9857. to 889,9927. Five times the

See Fourth Annual Report of Local Government Board, 1875,

p. 241.