It is curious to note the many kinds of opposition these first railways encountered. Said Mr. Berkeley, a member of Parliament for Cheltenham, “Nothing is more distasteful to me than to hear the echo of our hills reverberating with the noise of hissing railroad engines running through the heart of our hunting country, and destroying that noble sport to which I have been accustomed from my childhood.” One Colonel Sibthorpe declared that he “would rather meet a highwayman, or see a burglar on his premises, than an engineer; he should be much more safe, and of the two classes he thought the former more respectable!” Sir Astley Cooper, the eminent surgeon, said to Robert Stephenson, when the latter called to see him about a new road, “Your scheme is preposterous in the extreme. It is of so extravagant a character as to be positively absurd. Then look at the recklessness of your proceedings! You are proposing to cut up our estates in all directions for the purpose of making an unnecessary road. Do you think for one moment of the destruction of property involved in it? Why, gentlemen, if this sort of thing is allowed to go on, you will in a very few years _destroy the noblesse_!” Physicians maintained that travel through tunnels would be most prejudicial to health. Dr. Lardner protested against passengers being compelled to put up with what he called “the destruction of the atmospheric air,” and Sir Anthony Carlisle insisted that “tunnels would expose healthy people to colds, catarrhs, and consumption.” Many critics expected the boilers of the locomotives to explode at any and all times. Others were sure that the railways would throw so many workmen out of employment that revolution must follow, and still others declared that England was being delivered utterly into the power of a small group of manufacturers and mine-owners. But in spite of all this the people took to riding on the railways and England prospered. The aristocracy held out the longest. Noblemen did not relish the thought of traveling in the same carriages with workmen. The private coach had for long been a badge of station. For a time, therefore, the old families and country gentility sent their servants and their luggage by train, but themselves jogged along the old post-roads in the family chariots. But there were more accidents and more delays in travel by coach than by train, and so, one by one, they pocketed their pride and capitulated. The Duke of Wellington, who had seen the accident to Mr. Huskisson near Liverpool, held out against such travel for a long time. But when Queen Victoria, in 1842, used the railway to go from London to Windsor, the last resistance ended, and the Iron Duke, together with the rest of his order, followed the Queen’s example. Said the famous Dr. Arnold of Rugby, as he watched a train speeding through the country, “I rejoice to see it, and think that feudality is gone forever. It is so great a blessing to think that any one evil is really extinct.”