In all this excitement and press of travel, accidents were, of course, unavoidable. I dreaded one, as I felt it would be the crucial point. It might turn against me the popular feeling, now so strongly setting in my direction, for the "mob" (so called) of London is fully as excitable and as ungovernable as the "mob" of Paris, and its prejudices are more deeply intrenched. Finally, the dreaded accident came. A boy was killed, and I was arrested for manslaughter.
In order to appease public feeling, I paid the expenses of the boy's funeral, and did everything that could possibly be done to pay, in a material way, for his death. The accident was entirely unavoidable, and the tramway was not responsible for it, but there was a great deal of feeling, chiefly due to the agitation of the 'bus drivers. Sir John Villiers Shelley, member of Parliament, a relative of the poet, who was chairman of the Metropolitan Board of Works and the representative of the omnibus people, led the fight against me. We had a terrific struggle. The bill to authorize the tramways had gone to Parliament, and this was now defeated by a few votes. I had six of the ablest lawyers of England to represent me (through Baxter, Rose & Norton, solicitors), but the influence of the 'bus men, aided by the sentiment in certain quarters against me on account of my speeches in favor of the American Union, was too strong for me, and I had to abandon the fight in London.
I then went to the Potteries in Staffordshire, and there, after renewing the same kind of fighting that I had had in London, in every new town I undertook to lay railways in, I succeeded in building seven miles of track through the crockery-making country. Those tracks are there to-day.
My failure in London, which was to have been expected, must be set off by these successes in Birkenhead and in Staffordshire. I am entitled to the credit of laying the first street-railways in England, having to overcome the most formidable of all the enemies of progress—British prejudice. I afterward went to Darlington, where Stephenson had built his first railway, from Stockton to Darlington, in '29, the year of my birth, and I constructed a tramway there to connect the two steam railways through that town.
My life, therefore, spans the entire railway building of the world. The first railway was built the year I was born, and since that time, in a space of seventy-three years, more than 200,000 miles of railway have been constructed in the United States alone. In much of this great work I have had some share. I suggested the railway that connects Melbourne with its port, and mapped out the present railway system in Australia thirty-nine years ago; I organized the line that connects the Eastern States with the great Middle West—the Atlantic and Great Western Railway; and I organized and built the first railway that pierced the great American desert, and brought the Atlantic and Pacific coasts into close touch and led to the development of the far West.
I may mention here, also, that I built a street-railway in Geneva, Switzerland, which is still in use; and one in Copenhagen, which proved that there was at least something sound in "the state of Denmark." Other railways, as in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia, suggested by me, have been changed from horse to trolley lines. I also suggested the road in Bombay, India, which was the first railway in all Asia, now extended.
It may be of interest to record that when I began building street-railways, I sent to the United States and got the plans of the Philadelphia roads and of the New York Third Avenue line. It was therefore upon the models of American roads that these foreign railways were constructed.
It is sometimes said that it is remarkable that little is known of my connection with these great enterprises—for they were great, and epoch-making. But my achievements in England, in the pioneer work of building street-railways, is a matter of recorded history. An account of my work there will be found in a book by Dr. Albert Shaw, editor of the Review of Reviews, Municipal Government in Great Britain, as well as in other books that deal with the industrial life of the period.