The mob was unarmed, but carried a plentiful display of banners with inscriptions more or less revolutionary. Acting under the orders of the magistrates, the Manchester Yeomanry and the hussars, with drawn swords, dashed through the crowd in the direction of the temporary platform, where they captured Henry Hunt and others. The would-be reformers fled in every direction, and the arrival of the Cheshire Yeomanry assisted rapidly to clear the field. After this onslaught--for it could not be called a fight--three or four people were found to have been killed, and twenty-two men and eight women were carried off to the infirmary; but it subsequently transpired that eight persons were killed and several hundreds were wounded. Henry Hunt was tried for sedition, and sentenced to two years' imprisonment, but some of his friends got off with a lesser penalty. When the times again became settled, there was a vast increase in the population of the towns and villages where factories and workshops were established, and this increase came from all the surrounding districts and from other counties, whose sons, hearing of the rise of new trades and industries, came with their families and settled in Lancashire. A careful study of the surnames of any of our manufacturing towns will show that about this time a very large number of names now for the first time appeared in these districts, a small percentage of which were of foreign origin, but the greater proportion were English. The tendency was, therefore, to concentrate the scattered population around certain centres; thus it came about that in some parishes which remained purely agricultural, the population for years remained stationary, or even decreased. Thus we find, in the extensive parish of St. Michael's-on-Wyre, the population between 1801 and 1871 had only risen from 1,197 to 1,290, whilst that of Goosnargh shows an actual decrease of 545 inhabitants between 1821 and 1861. The railway system was first introduced into Lancashire in 1830, when the line between Manchester and Liverpool was opened, which ceremony was marred by the fatal accident to William Huskisson, which happened at Parkside, near Newton-le-Willows. The cost of this railway up to June 30 previous to its being opened for traffic was £820,000, but before the end of 1838 the total expenditure had reached £1,443,897; other railways soon followed, and before a generation had passed away the county was intersected in every direction by these iron roads. Steam packets were in use before the railways were started; they first plied on the canals in 1812.