Railway Expansion 245 



In effect, the very efforts made by the canal companies to 

 preserve the monopoly they had so long and so profitably 

 enjoyed were only a direct means of encouraging railway 

 expansion ; though few great institutions, destined to lead to 

 a great social and economic revolution, have established 

 their position in the face of more prejudice, greater difficulties, 

 and less sympathetic support from " the powers that be " 

 than was the case with the railways. 



The traders of the country were naturally favourable to 

 them, since the need for improved means of communication, 

 following on the ever-expanding trade and industry of the 

 land, was becoming almost daily more and more acute. But 

 the vested interests, as represented alike by holders of canal 

 shares, by turnpike road trustees and investors, and by the 

 coaching interests, were against the railways ; the Press 

 of the country was to a great extent against them ; leaders 

 in the literary and the social worlds either ignored or con- 

 demned them ; landowners first opposed and then black- 

 mailed them ; Governments sought to control and to tax 

 rather than to assist them ; and then, when the railways had 

 proved that they were less objectionable than prejudiced 

 critics had assumed, and were likely even to be a source of 

 profitable investment, they were boomed by speculators into 

 a popularity that led both to successive " railway manias " 

 and to the whole railway system being still further burdened 

 with an excessive capital expenditure which has been more 

 or less to its prejudice ever since. 



Some of the early denunciations by those who would have 

 considered themselves, in their day, to be leaders of public 

 opinion, if not of light and learning, afford interesting examples 

 of the hostility which railways, in common with every in- 

 novation that seeks to alter established habits and customs, 

 had to encounter. 



In the article published in the " Quarterly Review " for 

 March, 1825, in which proposals for making railways general 

 throughout the country are condemned as " visionary schemes 

 unworthy of notice," it is further said in reference to the 

 Woolwich Railway : 



"It is certainly some consolation to those who are to be 

 whirled at the rate of eighteen or twenty miles an hour, by 

 means of a high pressure engine, to be told that they are in 



