All this is not only amusing, but vastly instructive—these beaters of
shoe lasts on the lintel of genius. Here we have a deep and vivid study
presented to us of popular ignorance, that universal coagulant of truth.
In 1824, George Stephenson had said to his son and a companion: “Now
lads, I will tell you that I think you will live to see the day when
railways will come to supersede almost all other methods of conveyance
in this country—when mail coaches will go by railway, and railroads will
become the Great Highway for the King and all his subjects. The time is
coming when it will be cheaper for a working man to travel on a railway
than to walk on foot.”
The victory was won in 1825, the year following this memorable prophecy;
yet, in 1835, the reactionaries were still fighting a rear guard action,
and we find the landed gentry sending forward their servants and luggage
by rail and condemning themselves to jog along the roads in the family
coach. On the Continent it was just the same, and even in 1862 the Papal
Government opposed the opening of the Rome and Naples railway. The rear
guard fought on until June, 1842, when, on a certain Monday, Her Majesty
Queen Victoria made her first railway trip. It was from Windsor to
London, and her coach had a crown on its roof. The reactionaries went
head over heels, donned their frock coats or whatever garment
appertained to their social rank, and declared the railway the greatest
blessing God had ever permitted man to discover. The Marquis of Bristol,
wildly excited, said that “if necessary, they might _make a tunnel
beneath his very drawing-room_,” and the Rev. F. Litchfield that he did
not mind if a railway ran through his bedroom, “with the bedposts for a
station.” Ever irrational and unbalanced, very ordinary men went as mad
on railways as they had been mad against them. The panic of 1844–1846
was the result. In the last-mentioned year applications were made to
Parliament for powers to raise £389,000,000 for the construction of new
lines.
On the 26th of June, 1847, a year before George Stephenson died, he
attended the opening of the Trent Valley Railway. Sir Robert Peel was
his host and proclaimed him “the chief of our practical philosophers.”
Seven baronets and two or three dozen members of Parliament, all in
frock coats and tall hats, did homage to the great engineer, whilst the
clergy blessed the enterprise and bid all hail to the new line as
“enabling them to carry on with greater facility those operations in
connection with religion which were calculated to be so beneficial to
the country.”
I wonder what passed in George Stephenson’s mind. In 1825 he was
universally proclaimed mad and a danger to society; in 1847 he is
proclaimed “the chief of our practical philosophers” and the saviour of
society. I wonder which he objected to most—their abuse or their praise?
Both, I should imagine, were largely overlooked by him, for he was a
very great man, and surely those who abused him and praised him—very,
very small—truly insignificant.