available for sea-going vessels; and, after it had been so employed, another considerable interval elapsed before the idea appears to have been seriously entertained of using it as a moving force on terra firma, and making it instrumental on railroads, and even then the leading, if not the sole, idea was, that steam power might be applied advantageously to transporting heavy weights; that it might become the source of quick motion was little dreamed of; in the language of Darwin, it might "drag the slow barge," but could hardly be expected to "drive the rapid car;" and when Mr. George Stephenson, the distinguished engineer, whose name is so honourably identified with the original formation and subsequent improvement of railroads, first suggested the possibility of progressing on them at the rate of twelve miles an hour, he was laughed to scorn by practical men, but he has had an ample triumph since, in witnessing that rate doubled, trebled, and for short distances even quintupled.

22. It is almost as difficult to bring home and familiarise to the mind the effects already produced by the application of steam as a moving force to railroads, as to anticipate the results reserved for it to achieve. It has more than realised, as to the rate of speed, all that we ever read in the Arabian Nights, about flying chests and enchanted horses. Supposing the ordinary rate of stage-coach travelling to have been about six miles an hour, and the greatest sustained rate of railway travelling to be about forty-five miles an hour, you now, by the latter mode of travelling, reach Exeter in about the same time as would have taken you by the former to Windsor. Practically, therefore, to the inhabitants of London, railway travelling has brought Exeter to Windsor, and Liverpool to Tring, and it will bring York to Luton, and Edinburgh to York. It has rendered Milan as easily accessible as Paris used to be by the old system of diligence travelling, and will eventually bring Naples to Milan. hours now on the continental railroads will carry the traveller over the same space as, under the old system, occupied four and twenty. So much as to the mere saving of time; but, in the next place, you are carried without any jolting or

Six

feeling of fatigue, or without any expense except that of the carriage itself, as from the rapid rate of speed you may travel two hundred miles without requiring any refreshment. In the course of a few years, probably, the immense superiority of railway travelling will cause one of the greatest achievements of the fifteenth century to be comparatively forgotten, and the passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, so far at least as passengers are concerned, be as little frequented as before that celebrated Cape was doubled by Vasco de Gama, the ordinary route being the Mediterranean, Egypt, the Desert, and the Red Sea, or the Persian Gulf, should our good understanding with the courts of Constantinople and Teheran be unable to effect a continuous railroad from the Mediterranean to the Indus. If the duration of life is to be measured by the amount of interesting objects we are enabled to survey and study, railway travelling may be said to have quadrupled it, and brought back the patriarchal ages. Its direct influence on the promotion of general knowledge is likely to be prodigious, as distance may almost be said to be annihilated. In the language of the Vulgate," Pertransibunt terram et augebitur scientia." Nor is its effect likely to be less powerful on the advancement of physical science, more especially those branches of it which depend on accurate, varied, and extensive observation, Botany, Geology, Mineralogy, Electricity, Magnetism, Meteorology, Astronomy, and Geography. In a politicoeconomical point of view, the effects of railways are likely to be most important. Ultimately they are probably destined to supersede every other mode of inland conveyance, both for passengers and goods; and, as the horses now employed in drawing coaches and waggons will thereby be rendered unnecessary, the ground employed at present in raising hay and oats for them may be converted to growing corn, and feeding cattle for the support of human beings. From the increased facility of transporting manure, and bringing the produce of the most distant estates to market, new soils are likely to be brought under cultivation, and those already cultivated to be rendered more productive, so that population may go on augmenting at its present rate not only without any increase

of price in the necessaries of life, but even with a great reduction. The experience of the thirty years that have elapsed since the General Pacification of 1815, tends to disprove one of the leading facts on which Malthus founded many of the reasonings in his celebrated Essay, that all the first quality land in England was already brought under cultivation, and that as additional supplies of food could only be raised by resorting continually to worse and worse soils, which with a greater outlay of capital would produce a more scanty return, the price of food must go on increasing in a rapid ratio, and either check the rate of increase of the population of the country, or the rate continuing the same, deteriorate the condition of the labouring classes, and engender more intense wretchedness. Now the course of events has been so far from realising this prediction, that in the year 1835 wheat, for the first time for a hundred years, was below forty shillings a quarter, while the average amount of foreign grain imported has been steadily diminishing ever since the commencement of the present century*; a conclusive proof that Malthus, with all his acuteness and sagacity, had mistaken the artificial rise in the price of corn resulting from the depreciation of the paper currency, for the natural rise which would be the inevitable effect of the diminished fertility of the soil, and the exhaustion of the powers of nature. In a political point of view, the consequences of railroads will probably be great. In proportion as it becomes more easy to visit distant parts of the world, distant parts of the world will be more visited. Perhaps in a few years all the countries of Europe will be as easily accessible, and at as small an expenditure of time and labour as the different counties of England are at present, and the countries of Asia then, as of Europe now; and it will be as discreditable for a man calling himself a traveller not to have looked into the cavern temples of Ellora and Elephanta, as not to have

"Stood within the Coliseum's wall, Midst the chief relics of almighty Rome."

BYRON'S Manfred.

* Alison's History of Europe, vol. x. p. 512.

23. The effect of all this must be, not only to make us better acquainted with the face of the earth, and with all the appearances, productions, and operations of nature, but to enlarge in an equal degree our stores of moral and political information, augment our acquaintance with human nature, and make man better known to man. New desires will be raised, and new products discovered susceptible of gratifying them; new capacities developed, and new objects devised capable of giving them full exercise and employment. We may reasonably expect that the first effect of this will be to soften national prejudices, to moderate national antipathies, and calm national passions; to convince the various people of the earth of their close connexion with, and intimate dependence on, each other; and demonstrate how much more is to be gained by the peaceable exchanges of commerce than by the cruel ravages of war, and how infinitely the fruits of love transcend those of hate. Perhaps the last and best effect will be to mitigate the bitter feelings arising out of the diversity of religious creeds, that worst passion of human nature, which has always been the first to take up arms, and the last to lay them down, the odium theologicum; to induce the votaries of Moses and Mahomet, of Budha and Brahma, of Christ and Confucius, convinced that the creeds of all contain much that is excellent, to tolerate what each regards as objectionable in the other, and, since the imperfection of human nature and the weakness of human reason will not allow them to agree, to come to a mutual understanding, that they will at least agree to differ.

24. Perhaps at no period since the very early stages of the French Revolution, that great event so pregnant with hopes and disappointments, with virtues and crimes, could the sanguine expectations contained in the following passage of Condorcet, as to the possible future attainments of the species, have appeared less extravagant, or better warranted by the general aspect and rapid improvement of society. "To such of my readers as may be slow in admitting the possibility of this progressive improvement in the human race, allow me to state as an example the history of that

science in which the advances of discovery are the most. certain, and in which they may be measured with the greatest precision. Those elementary truths of geometry and of astronomy, which in India and Egypt formed an occult science upon which an ambitious priesthood founded its influence, were become in the time of Archimedes and Hipparchus the subjects of common education in the public schools of Greece. In the last century a few years of study were sufficient for comprehending all that Archimedes and Hipparchus knew; and, at present, two years employed under an able teacher carry the student beyond those conclusions which limited the inquiries of Leibnitz and of Newton. Let any person reflect on these facts: let him follow the immense chain which connects the inquiries of Euler with those of a priest of Memphis; let him observe at each epoch how genius outstrips the present age, and how it is overtaken by mediocrity in the next; he will perceive that nature has furnished us with the means of abridging and facilitating our intellectual labour, and that there is no reason for apprehending that simplifications can ever have an end. He will perceive that, at the moment when a multitude of particular solutions and of insulated facts begin to distract the attention and to overcharge the memory, the former gradually lose themselves in one general method, and the latter unite in one general law; and that these generalisations continually succeeding, one to another, like the successive multiplications of a number by itself, have no other limit than that infinity which the human faculties are unable to comprehend." (Condorcet sur l'Instruction Publique, as quoted in Dugald Stewart's Philosophy of the Human Mind, vol. i. p. 222.)