on Domestic and General Improvement. 685 



" When the carriage of goods, which is now about 9d. or lod. a ton per 

 mile by land is reduced to 2d., and when, in point of speed, one day does 

 the work of four, the heaviest commodities, such as corn, potatoes, coals, 

 will bear the expense of carriage for a hundred miles. The result of this 

 will be, that the expense of living in great towns will be reduced, and the 

 price of raw produce will rise in remote parts of the country. The fa- 

 cility, celerity, and cheapness of internal intercourse, contribute more, pro- 

 bably, to the advancement of civilisation than all other circumstances put 

 together. Sixty or seventy j'ears ago, the journey from Edinburgh to Lon- 

 don occupied twenty days. At present, taking the average of all the modes 

 of conveyance by land and water, it occupies three or four, and the quantity 

 of travelling has increased probably twenty or thirty fold. Are we too 

 sanguine in anticipating another increase equally great, when the time is 

 reduced from three or four days to twenty hours, the expense almost in the 

 same proportion, and when the traveller is put in possession of a much 

 higher degree of ease and comfort ? Let the improvement we speak of be 

 realised, let what was once a journey of twenty days be reduced to one of 

 as many hours, and we have not a doubt that we shall have five hundred 

 times as much travelling as we had in the year 1760. In point of fact, 

 when the time is reduced from eighty hours to twenty, the result is exactly 

 the same as if Edinburgh were brought as near to London as Leicester or 

 Birmingham ; and, to pursue the comparison, when the journey was one of 

 twenty days, the effect was the same as if Edinburgh had stood in Iceland. 

 Besides, we must always remember that the intercourse grows in a much 

 greater ratio than the distance is shortened. Volumes might be written 

 without exhausting the materials for speculation arising out of such a change. 

 To use our own words, when writing upon this subject in 1824 : — ' With 

 so great a facility and celerity of communication, the provincial towns of 

 an empire would become so many suburbs of the metropolis — or rather 

 the effect would be similar to that of collecting the whole inhabitants into 

 one city. Commodities, inventions, discoveries, opinions, would circulate 

 with a rapidity hitherto unknown, and, above all, the intercourse of man 

 with man, province with province, and nation with nation, would be pro- 

 digiously increased.' " 



" We now look back with some pride to the series of papers which we 

 published in the Scotsman on this subject four years ago, which first deve- 

 loped the advantages derivable from employing locomotive carriages on 

 railways, for the purposes of commercial intercourse of all kinds. Prac- 

 tical men, as they term themselves, were shocked.* The trial has been 

 made, however, and the result has confirmed and even exceeded our miost 

 sanguine anticipations." 



" * Mr. Nicholas Wood, one of the judges at Liverpool, published an oc- 

 tavo volume, in 1825, containing the result of his own experiments at Kil- 

 lingsworth, and inserted the following remarks in allusion to the articles in 

 the Scotsman : — ' It is far from my wish to promulgate to the world that 

 the ridiculous expectations, or rather professions of the enthusiastic specu- 

 latist will be realised, and that we shall see engines travelling at the rate of 

 twelve, sixteen, eighteen, or twenty miles an hour. Nothing could do more 

 harm towards their adoption or general improvement than the promulgation 

 of such nonsense ! ' Mr. Wood, as the editor of the Mechanics^ Magazine 

 observes, has been spared to see, not only what he declared to be ' ridicu- 

 lous ' and ' nonsense ' reduced to an unquestionable matter of fact, but of 

 witnessing something so much more extraordinary, that had any one hinted 

 it to him in his days of incredulity, he would, we presume, have pronounced 

 it to be absolute madness." 



