[CHAPTER IV.]
TWO CITIES THAT WANTED TO GET NEAR EACH OTHER—A NEW FRIEND.
Manchester, thirty miles south-east of Liverpool, is the great centre of our cotton trade. Its cloths are found in every market in the world. Cotton coming to Liverpool is sent to the Manchester mills, and the goods which the mills turn out are returned to Liverpool to be shipped elsewhere. The two cities, therefore, are intimately connected by constant intercourse and mutual interest.
Two water communications existed between them: one by the rivers Mersey and Irwell, the other by the famous Bridgewater Canal, which did an immense business at an enormous profit. But the Manchester mills were fast outgrowing these slow and cumbersome modes of travel. Liverpool warehouses were piled with bales of cotton waiting to go, and the mills at Manchester had often to stop because it did not come. Goods also found as much difficulty in getting back. Merchants and manufacturers both grumbled. Business was in straits. What was to be done? Carting was quite out of the question. Canal owners were besought to enlarge their water power. No, they would do nothing. They were satisfied with things as they were. Their dividends were sure.
But want demands supply. Need creates resources. Something must be done to facilitate the transit of goods between the two cities. What? Build a tramroad, or a railroad. Nobody, however, but a very fast man would risk his good sense by seriously advising a railroad. Prudent men would certainly shun him. A tramroad was a better understood thing. The collieries had used small pieces of them for years. A tramroad then. Business men put their heads together, and began earnestly to talk of a tramroad.
Edward James, a rich and enterprising man, entered heartily into the project, and undertook to make surveys for a suitable route. And not long after a party of surveyors were seen in the fields near Liverpool. Their instruments and movements excited attention. People eyed them with anxiety: suspicions were roused: the inhabitants became alarmed. Who were they, making such mysterious measurements and calculations on other people's land? A mob gradually gathered, whose angry tones and threatening gestures warned the surveyors of a storm brewing over their heads. Wisely considering that flight was better than fight, they took themselves off, and by-and-by turned up farther on.
The landowners, who might be supposed to have known better, told the farmers to drive them off; and the farmers, with their hands, were only too ready to obey. They stationed themselves at the field gates and bars with pitchforks, rakes, shovels, sticks, and dared the surveyors to come on. A poor chain-man, not quite as nimble as his pursuers, made his leap over a fence, quickened by a pitchfork from behind. Even women and children joined the hue and cry, pelting the strangers with stones and dirt whenever they had a chance. The colliers were not behind the farmers in their foolish hostility. A stray surveyor was caught and thrown into a pond.