CHAPTER XI. THE RAILWAY JUBILEE, AND GLASGOW AND SOUTH-WESTERN OFFICERS AND CLERKS The 27th day of September, 1875, was the Jubilee of the British Railway System. It was celebrated by a banquet given by the North-Eastern Railway Company at Darlington, for the Stockton and Darlington section of the North-Eastern was, as I have mentioned before, the first public railway. A thousand guests were invited. No building in Darlington could accommodate such a number, and a great marquee, large enough to dine a thousand people, was obtained from London. My chief attended the banquet and I remained at home to hear the news when he returned. Dan Godfrey's band was there, and Dan Godfrey himself composed some music for the occasion. The _menu_ was long, elaborate and imposing; equalled only by the _toast list_, which contained no less than sixteen separate toasts. It was a Gargantuan feast befitting a great occasion. Could we men of to-day have done it justice and sat it and the toast list out, I wonder. It took place over forty years ago, when the endurance of the race was, perhaps, greater than now; or why do we now shorten our banquets and shirk the bottle? The Stockton and Darlington Railway is 54 miles long, and its authorised capital was 102,000 pounds--a modest sum indeed, under 2,000 pounds per mile, less than half the outlay for land alone of the North Midland line and not one twenty-fifth of the average cost of British railways as they stand to-day, which is some 57,000 pounds per mile. The railway owed its origin to George Stephenson and to Edward Pease, the wealthy Quaker and manufacturer of Darlington, both burly men, strong in mind as body. The first rail was laid, with much ceremony, near the town of Stockton, on the 23rd of May, 1822, amid great opposition culminating in acts of personal violence, for the early railways, from interests that feared their rivalry, and often from sheer blind ignorance itself, had bitter antagonism to contend with. The day brought an immense concourse of people to Darlington, all bent on seeing the novel spectacle of a train of carriages and wagons filled with passengers and goods, drawn along a _railway_ by a _steam_ engine. At eight o'clock in the morning the train started with its load--22 vehicles--hauled by Stephenson's "Locomotion," driven by Stephenson himself. "Such was its velocity that in some parts of the journey the speed was frequently 12 miles an hour." The number of passengers reached 450, and the goods and merchandise amounted to 90 tons--a great accomplishment, and George Stephenson and Edward Pease were proud men that day. Seven years from this present time will witness the _Centenary_ of the railway system. How shall we celebrate _it_? Will railway proprietor, railway director and railway manager on that occasion be animated with the gladness, the pride and the hope that brightened the Jubilee Banquet? Who can tell? The future of railways is all uncertain.