What wonder that such an innovation as railways was strenuously opposed,
threatening, as it did, the coaching interest, and the posting interest,
the canal interest, and the sporting interest, and private interests of
every variety. “Gentlemen, as an individual,” said a sporting M.P. for
Cheltenham, “I hate your railways; I detest them altogether; I wish the
concoctors of the Cheltenham and Oxford, and the concoctors of every
other scheme, including the solicitors and engineers, were at rest in
Paradise. Gentlemen, I detest railroads; nothing is more distasteful to
me than to hear the echo of our hills reverberating with the noise of
hissing railroad engines, running through the heart of our hunting
country, and destroying that noble sport to which I have been accustomed
from my childhood.” And at Tewkesbury, one speaker contended that “any
railway would be injurious;” compared engines to “war-horses and fiery
meteors;” and affirmed that “the evils contained in Pandora’s box were
but trifles compared with those that would be consequent on railways.”
Even in go-aheadative America, some steady jog trotting opponents raised
their voices against the nascent system; one of whom (a canal
stockholder, by the way) chronicled the following objective arguments.
“He saw what would be the effect of it; that it would set the whole world
a-gadding. Twenty miles an hour, sir! Why you will not be able to keep
an apprentice-boy at his work; every Saturday evening he must take a trip
to Ohio, to spend the Sabbath with his sweetheart. Grave plodding
citizens will be flying about like comets. All local attachments must be
at an end. It will encourage flightiness of intellect. Veracious people
will turn into the most immeasurable liars; all their conceptions will be
exaggerated by their magnificent notions of distance. ‘Only a hundred
miles off! Tut, nonsense, I’ll step across, madam, and bring your fan!’
‘Pray, sir, will you dine with me to-day at my little box at Alleghany?’
‘Why, indeed, I don’t know. I shall be in town until twelve. Well, I
shall be there; but you must let me off in time for the theatre.’ And
then, sir, there will be barrels of pork, and cargoes of flour, and
chaldrons of coals, and even lead and whiskey, and such-like sober things
that have always been used to sober travelling, whisking away like a set
of sky-rockets. It will upset all the gravity of the nation. If two
gentlemen have an affair of honour, they have only to steal off to the
Rocky Mountains, and there no jurisdiction can touch them. And then,
sir, think of flying for debt! A set of bailiffs, mounted on
bomb-shells, would not overtake an absconded debtor, only give him a fair
start. Upon the whole, sir, it is a pestilential, topsy-turvy,
harum-scarum whirligig. Give me the old, solemn, straightforward,
regular Dutch canal—three miles an hour for expresses, and two for
ordinary journeys, with a yoke of oxen for a heavy load! I go for beasts
of burthen: it is more primitive and scriptural, and suits a moral and
religious people better. None of your hop-skip-and-jump whimsies for
me.”
—_Sharpe’s London Journal_.