[12] While the means of travel were improving, the inns and towns even along the great stage routes had not improved. "When you alight at a country tavern," said a traveler, "it is ten to one you stand holding your horse, bawling for the hostler while the landlord looks on. Once inside the tavern every man, woman, and child plies you with questions. To get a dinner is the work of hours. At night you are put into a room with a dozen others and sleep two or three in a bed. In the morning you go outside to wash your face and then repair to the barroom to see your face in the only looking glass the tavern contains." Another traveler complains that at the best hotel in New York there was neither glass, mug, cup, nor carpet, and but one miserable rag dignified by the name of towel. [Illustration: MANSION HOUSE, 39 BROADWAY, NEW YORK, IN 1831.] [13] As early as 1814 John Stevens applied to New Jersey for a railroad charter, and when it was granted, he sought to persuade the New York Canal Commission to build a railroad instead of a canal. In 1823 Pennsylvania granted Stevens and his friends a charter to build a railroad from Philadelphia to the Susquehanna. In 1825 Stevens built a circular road at Hoboken and used a steam locomotive to show the possibility of such a means of locomotion. But all these schemes were ahead of the times. [14] The friends of canals bitterly opposed railroads as impractical. Snow, it was said, would block them for weeks. If locomotives were used, the sparks would make it impossible to carry hay or other things combustible. The boilers would blow up as they did on steamboats. Canals were therefore safer and cheaper. Read McMaster's _History of the People of the U. S._, Vol. VI, pp. 87-89. [15] Almost all the early roads used this device. There was one such inclined plane at Albany; another at Belmont, now in Philadelphia; a third on the Paterson and Hudson Railroad near Paterson; and a fourth on the Baltimore and Ohio. When Pennsylvania built her railroad over the Allegheny Mountains, many such planes were necessary, so that the Portage Railroad, as it was called, was a wonder of engineering skill. [16] The state built the railroads, like the canals, as highways open to everybody. At first no cars or motive power, except at the inclined planes, were supplied. Any car owner could carry passengers or freight who paid the state two cents a mile for each passenger and $4.92 for each car sent over the rails. After 1836 the state provided locomotives and charged for hauling cars.