In all this excitement and press of travel, accidents were, of course, unavoidable. I dreaded one, as I felt it would be the crucial point. It might turn against me the popular feeling, now so strongly setting in my direction, for the "mob" (so called) of London is fully as excitable and as ungovernable as the "mob" of Paris, and its prejudices are more deeply intrenched. Finally, the dreaded accident came. A boy was killed, and I was arrested for manslaughter. In order to appease public feeling, I paid the expenses of the boy's funeral, and did everything that could possibly be done to pay, in a material way, for his death. The accident was entirely unavoidable, and the tramway was not responsible for it, but there was a great deal of feeling, chiefly due to the agitation of the 'bus drivers. Sir John Villiers Shelley, member of Parliament, a relative of the poet, who was chairman of the Metropolitan Board of Works and the representative of the omnibus people, led the fight against me. We had a terrific struggle. The bill to authorize the tramways had gone to Parliament, and this was now defeated by a few votes. I had six of the ablest lawyers of England to represent me (through Baxter, Rose & Norton, solicitors), but the influence of the 'bus men, aided by the sentiment in certain quarters against me on account of my speeches in favor of the American Union, was too strong for me, and I had to abandon the fight in London. I then went to the Potteries in Staffordshire, and there, after renewing the same kind of fighting that I had had in London, in every new town I undertook to lay railways in, I succeeded in building seven miles of track through the crockery-making country. Those tracks are there to-day. My failure in London, which was to have been expected, must be set off by these successes in Birkenhead and in Staffordshire. I am entitled to the credit of laying the first street-railways in England, having to overcome the most formidable of all the enemies of progress--British prejudice. I afterward went to Darlington, where Stephenson had built his first railway, from Stockton to Darlington, in '29, the year of my birth, and I constructed a tramway there to connect the two steam railways through that town.