1831.] [ 481 ] 



MECHANISM AND ITS MARVELS. 



This is the age of mechanical invention, and we have no doubt, that 

 before its course is run out, we shall have made a prodigious advance 

 in the power of man over nature. The railway system is of itself a 

 great triumph. We are not to be discouraged by the accidents which 

 from time to time occur in its use, for in every instance of those acci- 

 dents the misfortune has been fairly earned by the folly or rashness of 

 the sufferer. Two or three things of this kind have lately happened 

 on the Liverpool railway. But what is to be expected, if a clown who 

 thinks he can outrun a vehicle flying thirty miles an hour, is crushed 

 in consequence. Another fellow gets drunk, and will choose no place 

 to sleep off his drunkenness but the middle of the railway ; the engine 

 comes, with the rapidity of a shaft of lightning, and before the engineer 

 can see that there is any thing before him but the sky, the body is cut 

 in two. Another clown chooses to hang on the engine, at full speed, as 

 he would hang on the shafts of his cart ; warning is of no use to him ; 

 he drops off, and is ground into powder at the moment. But those are 

 no, more impeachments of the system than the possibility of breaking 

 one's neck by a fall from a first-floor window is an argument for living 

 on the ground. Even the more serious doubt whether the railway be in 

 reality the cheaper, as it is decidedly the more rapid and powerful mode, 

 vanishes before just consideration. The expense of the Liverpool rail- 

 way has been heavy, and like all commencements, there have been 

 errors, and even some unnecessary expenditures in the undertaking. A 

 railway too, on which the chief articles of carriage must be the bulky 

 products of manufacture, or the still bulkier raw material, must have 

 dimensions that can scarcely be required for the usual intercourse 

 of the country. There may have also been a rather ostentatious atten- 

 tion to magnificence in the design, which, however laudable and even 

 fitting in a great national monument, is not required in a mere instru- 

 ment of connection between two trading towns in a remote part of the 

 kingdom. But this is of all faults the most venial. We hope that no 

 London railway will be constructed without a view to the national 

 honour. It is a nobler monument than all the triumphal arches of 

 Rome. 



We say then that the Liverpool railway is an experiment no longer ; 

 that it has fully succeeded. The profits may be less than the sanguine- 

 ness of speculation imagined. But the facts are ascertained that a 

 steam-engine can carry weights to which no animal power is equal, with 

 a rapidity that sets all animal speed at defiance ; and that it can do this 

 without intermission, without regard of night or day, frost or sunshine, 

 the height of summer, or the depth of the most inclement season of the 

 year. If the Liverpool railway were not to pay its own expenses, all that 

 could be rationally said would be : ' ' There has been some rashness or clum- 

 siness in the details, but you have got all that an inventive people can re- 

 quire. You have got a new and mighty power of nature; such things are 

 not vouchsafed for nothing ; and your business is now to bring to it the 

 observation and ingenuity with which you have been furnished by Provi- 

 dence for such purposes, and to bring this noble principle, this new reve- 

 lation in mechanics, into the active and manageable employment of man." 

 One of the curious and useful results of the railway will probably be 

 some improvement in the communication of sound. Every body knows 



M.M. New Series. VOL. XI. No. 65. 3 Q 



