Yet there was this consolation. The very, very ordinary man, the British public at large, declared that “the weight of the locomotive (six tons!) would completely prevent its moving, and that railways, even if made, could never be worked by steam power.” Yet for ten years now, and more, the Killingworth engines were running daily!
The Stockton and Darlington line was a tremendous success; so also was the railway between Manchester and Liverpool, yet opposition thickened rather than lessened. In 1830, the “Rocket” had attained a speed of thirty-five miles an hour, yet, in 1832, Colonel Sibthorpe (the Army now come into the picture and oh! how bravely), declared his hatred of these “infernal railroads,” and that he “would rather meet a highwayman, or see a burglar on his premises, than an engineer!” When the Birmingham railway bill was before Parliament, Sir Astley Cooper, that most eminent of surgeons, declared: “You are entering upon an enormous undertaking of which you know nothing. Then look at the recklessness of your proceedings! You are proposing to destroy property, cutting up our estates in all directions! Why, gentlemen, if this sort of thing be permitted to go on, you will in a very few years destroy the noblesse!” And this, from a man who had been knighted for cutting a wen out of George IV.’s neck!
THE NATURE OF THE BEAST
All this is not only amusing, but vastly instructive—these beaters of shoe lasts on the lintel of genius. Here we have a deep and vivid study presented to us of popular ignorance, that universal coagulant of truth. In 1824, George Stephenson had said to his son and a companion: “Now lads, I will tell you that I think you will live to see the day when railways will come to supersede almost all other methods of conveyance in this country—when mail coaches will go by railway, and railroads will become the Great Highway for the King and all his subjects. The time is coming when it will be cheaper for a working man to travel on a railway than to walk on foot.”
The victory was won in 1825, the year following this memorable prophecy; yet, in 1835, the reactionaries were still fighting a rear guard action, and we find the landed gentry sending forward their servants and luggage by rail and condemning themselves to jog along the roads in the family coach. On the Continent it was just the same, and even in 1862 the Papal Government opposed the opening of the Rome and Naples railway. The rear guard fought on until June, 1842, when, on a certain Monday, Her Majesty Queen Victoria made her first railway trip. It was from Windsor to London, and her coach had a crown on its roof. The reactionaries went head over heels, donned their frock coats or whatever garment appertained to their social rank, and declared the railway the greatest blessing God had ever permitted man to discover. The Marquis of Bristol, wildly excited, said that “if necessary, they might make a tunnel beneath his very drawing-room,” and the Rev. F. Litchfield that he did not mind if a railway ran through his bedroom, “with the bedposts for a station.” Ever irrational and unbalanced, very ordinary men went as mad on railways as they had been mad against them. The panic of 1844–1846 was the result. In the last-mentioned year applications were made to Parliament for powers to raise £389,000,000 for the construction of new lines.
On the 26th of June, 1847, a year before George Stephenson died, he attended the opening of the Trent Valley Railway. Sir Robert Peel was his host and proclaimed him “the chief of our practical philosophers.” Seven baronets and two or three dozen members of Parliament, all in frock coats and tall hats, did homage to the great engineer, whilst the clergy blessed the enterprise and bid all hail to the new line as “enabling them to carry on with greater facility those operations in connection with religion which were calculated to be so beneficial to the country.”
I wonder what passed in George Stephenson’s mind. In 1825 he was universally proclaimed mad and a danger to society; in 1847 he is proclaimed “the chief of our practical philosophers” and the saviour of society. I wonder which he objected to most—their abuse or their praise? Both, I should imagine, were largely overlooked by him, for he was a very great man, and surely those who abused him and praised him—very, very small—truly insignificant.
PROTEAN IGNORANCE
Protean ignorance never dies; this is the problem which confronts us. George Stephenson has only been my peg upon which I have hung this musty old skin, indeed no golden fleece, but just as magical, so that I might the better examine it; and a fine stout peg it is—all of British oak.
Stephenson was the father of the locomotive; as to this there can be no dispute, and equally can there be no doubt that the locomotive has changed the superstructure of the civilized world, yet its foundations remain permanently fixed. Matter fluctuates as the will of man unmasks the material world; but the soul of man remains fixed, abiding in the solitude of his ignorance.