CHAP. X. SPECULATION OF SIR B. PHILLIPS. 181 



economy of horse labour on the iron railway. Yet a 

 heavy sigh escaped me as I thought of the inconceivable 

 millions of money which had been spent about Malta, 

 four or five of which might have been the means of 

 extending double lines of iron railway from London to 

 Edinburgh, Glasgow, Holyhead, Milford, Falmouth, 

 Yarmouth, Dover, and Portsmouth. A reward of a 

 single thousand would have supplied coaches and other 

 vehicles, of various degrees of speed, with the best 

 tackle for readily turning out ; and we might, ere this, 

 have witnessed our mail coaches running at the rate of 

 ten miles an hour drawn by a single horse, or impelled 

 fifteen miles an hour by Blenkinsop's steam-engine. 

 Such would have been a legitimate motive for over- 

 stepping the income of a nation, and the completion of 

 so great and useful a w r ork would have afforded rational 

 ground for public triumph in general jubilee." 



In the same year we find Mr. Lovell Edgworth, who 

 had for fifty years been advocating the superiority of 

 tram or railroads over common roads, writing to James 

 Watt (7th August, 1813): "I have always thought 

 that steam would become the universal lord, and that 

 we should in time scorn post-horses ; an iron railroad 

 would be a cheaper thing than a road upon the common 

 construction." Thomas Gray, of Nottingham, was 

 another speculator on the same subject. Though he 

 was no mechanic nor inventor, he had an enthusiastic 

 belief in the powers of the railroad system. Being a 

 native of Leeds, he had, when a boy, seen Blenkinsop's 

 locomotive at work on the Middletoii cogged railroad, 

 and from an early period he seems to have entertained 

 almost as sanguine views on the subject as Sir Richard 

 Phillips himself. It would appear that Gray was re- 

 siding in Brussels in 1816, when the project of a canal 

 from Charleroi, for the purpose of connecting Holland 

 with the mining districts of Belgium, was the subject of 

 discussion ; and, in conversation with Mr. John Cockerill 



