44 REVERIES ON RAIL-ROADS. 



attainable, would, towards the close of the present century, sub- 

 stantially realize that earliest dream of poetry, " the Golden Age." 

 But feverish as is the speculation that prevails teeming as do the 

 daily prints, both here and on the Continent,* with notices of lines 

 of rail-roads in every direction, and plans recommending nothing less 

 than to make them general throughout the kingdom we much 

 doubt if that time will ever arrive when this, or any other country, 

 shall possess a complete system of rail-roads, extending from the 

 capital to every point of the frontier, like so many radii from the 

 centre of a circle to its circumference. Difficult as it is for human 

 sagacity to predict in what manner the complicated relations of 

 society may be effected by any particular discovery in the moral or 

 physical world, yet we venture to pronounce that the operation of 

 rail-roads on the moral, physical, and intellectual condition of the 

 people of this country to be one fraught with consequences that 

 require considerable caution ; nor is the sudden and wholesale adop- 

 tion of such conveyances so advisable as the prospectuses of specu- 

 lators would lead us to believe. 



It is not a little singular that this invention, the subject at the 

 present moment of so much feverish excitement, should have 

 hitherto acted only as an accessory to the mode of communication it 

 seems destined to supersede, viz. canals and that, while the secret 

 of this invention was known full a century ago, and already in full 

 operation at Merthyr Tydvil, in Wales, the whole surface of 

 the country should have been intersected with canals, while the 

 rail-road should have languished in oblivion, and should at length be 

 brought forward at a period when their operations may admit of 

 some question as to the extent of their benefit to society. It would 

 have been fortunate if, at that period, rail-roads had been generally 

 adopted instead of canals ; their probable effect on the present state 

 of the country affords food for much curious speculation. Con- 

 sidered in the abstract as a mode of conveyance, none other can 

 compete with them. Besides speed, they possess the further desi- 

 deratum of certainty, and, unlike the canal, are unaffected by atmos- 

 pheric changes ; and, although no accurate estimates can be made of 

 their comparative cost, because both must depend upon circum- 

 stances always varying, and which can seldom be common to both, 

 yet we may say that the cost of the canal, supposing them to run 

 through the same line of country, is greater than that of the rail- 

 road, by nearly one-third. But it is rather relatively than abstract- 

 edly, that we are now led to consider this question one in which 

 every class of the community is deeply concerned ; for it is not, in its 



* In France it is in agitation to connect Calais and Marseilles by a road 

 through Lisle and Lyons, by following the left bank of the Soane; this line 

 would be crossed again by a branch one from Strasburg that would terminate at 

 Bayonne, and thus connect Germany and Spain. 



In Belgium, again, the Seance Centrale have just determined on a system of 

 rail-ways, the centre of which will be Malines, from whence one road will run 

 east to the Prussian frontier, through Louvaine, Verviers, and Liege ; a second 

 to the north, to Antwerp; a third west, through Ghent to Ostend; and a 

 fourth south, through Brussels to the French frontier; all this is to be 

 executed at the expense of the Belgian treasury ! 



