GEORGE STEPHENSON. 107 



inadequate to the growing requirements of trade. Besides the 

 road there were two canals for the traffic between Liverpool and 

 Manchester, the distance by the latter fifty-five miles, and the 

 carriage of goods in some instances ^2 per ton. Manchester 

 was so entirely dependent on Liverpool that better accommoda- 

 tion became a necessity. Another canal could not be made, 

 so a railway was projected; and the prospectus being issued in 

 1824, an Act was obtained, after failure in the session of 1825, 

 in the year 1826. 



It was tlie intention of its projectors to run the carriages 

 upon it at a high rate of speed. To do this with horses was 

 expensive ; and to work it by steam-power, it was supposed that 

 stationary engines would be required at short intei-vals along 

 the road, to draw the trains by ropes from one station to 

 another. While the necessity for the projected railway was 

 admitted on all hands, the idea of its being worked by locomo- 

 tives at a speed exceeding eight or nine miles an-hour was 

 ridiculed. And when George Stephenson stated that he could 

 make the locomotive travel at the rate of twenty miles an-hour, 

 it was received with incredulity, and doubts were whispered as 

 to his sanity. A reviewer in the Quarter/y stated that nothing 

 could be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out ot 

 locomotives travelling twice as fast as stage-coaches, and that 

 people would as soon suffer themselves to be fired off upon one 

 of Congreve's ricochet rockets as trust themselves to the mercy of 

 a machine going at such a rate. When examined before a parlia- 

 mentary committee, Stephenson's estimate of speed caused one 

 member of the committee to remark that the engineer could only 

 be fit for a lunatic asylum. The following case was put before 

 Stephenson : "Suppose, now, one of tliose engines to be going 

 along a railroad at the rate of nine or ten miles an-hour, and 



