they did all in their power to thwart the new scheme; how the Lord Derby and the Lord Sefton of that day, and other landowners, offered every resistance to the surveyors; how the Duke of Bridgewater’s farmers would not allow them to enter their fields, and the Duke’s gamekeepers had orders to shoot them; how even a clergyman threatened them with personal violence, and they had to do their work by stealth, while the reverend gentleman was conducting the services in his church; how newspaper and other writers declared that the locomotives would kill the birds, prevent cows from grazing and hens from laying, burn houses, and cause the extinction of the race of horses. All the civil engineers scouted the idea of a locomotive railway, and Stephenson was held up to derision as an ignoramus and a maniac by the “most eminent lawyers,” and the most advanced and “respectable” professional C.E.s of the time. An article appeared in the “Quarterly Review,” very favourable to the construction of railways, but remarking in reference to a proposed line between London and Woolwich: “What can be more palpably absurd and ridiculous than the prospect held out of locomotives travelling _twice as fast as stage coaches_! We should as soon expect the people of Woolwich to suffer themselves to be fired off upon one of Congreve’s _ricochet_ rockets as trust themselves to the mercy of a machine going at such a rate. We will back old Father Thames against the Woolwich Railway for any sum. We trust that Parliament will, in all railways it may sanction, limit the speed to _eight or nine miles an hour_, which we entirely agree with Mr. Sylvester is as great as can be ventured on with safety.” This passage, which reads so strangely now, may be seen in the “Quarterly Review” for March, 1825. But still more curious appear now the reports of the debates in Parliament, and of the evidence taken before the Parliamentary Committee, in which we find the opinions and fears of the best informed men of that period, and trace the frantic efforts of the holders of the “vested interests” to retain them, however obstructive of the public good. [Illustration: FIG. 41.—_Sankey Viaduct._ ] [Illustration: FIG. 42.—_Rails and Cramp-gauge._ ]