And our would-be Major Longbow would have had reason for the faith that was in him. In his highest flights he dared not exceed too violently the statistics of G. R. Porter, or have added too high a premium on the expectations of George Stephenson. The former calculated that up to the end of 1834, when not a hundred miles of Railway were open, the annual average of persons who travelled by coach was about two millions, each going over one hundred and eighty miles of ground in the year.[1] Supposing each individual performed that distance in three journeys, the whole number of _persons_ must have multiplied themselves into six millions of _passengers_. As to speed, Mr. George Stephenson said at a dinner-party given to him at Newcastle in 1844, that when he planned the Liverpool and Manchester line, the directors entreated him, when they went to Parliament, not to talk of going at a faster rate than ten miles an hour, or he “would put a cross upon the concern.” Mr. George Stephenson _did_ talk of fifteen miles an hour, and some of the Committee asked if he were not mad! Mr. Nicholas Wood delivered himself in a pamphlet as follows:— “It is far from my wish to promulgate to the world that the ridiculous expectations, or rather _professions_, of the _enthusiastic speculatist_ will be realised, and that we shall see engines travelling at the rate of twelve, sixteen, eighteen, twenty miles an hour. Nothing could do more harm towards their general adoption and improvement than the promulgation of such NONSENSE!” Footnote 1: “Porter’s Progress of the Nation,” vol. ii. p. 22. It would seem, then, that the Longbow of the aboriginal prospectuses was actually modest in his estimate as to passengers and speed. But only a few years must have made him utterly ashamed of his moderation and modesty. How disgusted he must have felt with his timid prolusions, even when 1843 arrived. For that year revealed travellers’ tales that exceeded his early romances by what Major Longbow himself would have called “an everlasting long chalk.” Within that year, seventy railroads, constructed at an outlay of sixty millions sterling, conveyed twenty-five millions of passengers three hundred and thirty millions of miles, at an average cost of one penny and three quarters per mile, and an average speed of twenty-four miles per hour, with but one fatal accident. But if our parent of railway proprietors were astonished at what happened in 1843, with what inconceivable amazement he must peruse the details of 1849! We should like to see the expression of his countenance while conning the report of Her Majesty’s Commissioners of Railways for last year. At the end of every sentence he would be sure to exclaim, “Who _would_ have thought it?”