In 1837, there were fifty-two mail coaches, and about 500 stage coaches. If we allow to each of them the full complement of passengers that it was authorised to carry, we shall probably arrive at a tolerably correct estimate of the number of persons who then used to travel daily in the United Kingdom. It is true that the average loads of mail and stage coaches was not considered to exceed two-thirds of their number when complete, but they should be considered as carrying full loads, to allow for passengers travelling only short stages. Thus viewed, the number of persons travelling by these conveyances throughout the Kingdom was (mail coaches seven, stage coaches fourteen, exclusive of guard and coachman) 7,364, or at the rate per annum (of 365 days) 2,687,860. If to these be added 25 per cent., as representing aristocracy with post horses, and plebiscity in waggons, and a few in canal boats, we arrive at a gross total of 3,359,825. To this number may be joined, say over a million who were passengers in river and coasting steamboats.[21] Every other traveller went by the means of locomotion beneficently granted to us by the all-wise and ever-provident Creator of all things human and divine. In 1837 the population of the United Kingdom was 25,650,426 persons, so that, assuming our calculation to be correct, the number of travellers journeying only by road was little more than an eighth of its population. As already stated, seven years previous to 1837, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway (31 miles long) had been opened for traffic. But during all that period it was simply a local line unconnected with any places except its two termini, and its then comparatively unimportant intermediate stations. Nevertheless, by the substitution of steam for horse power, the number of passengers (about 21,600 per annum), previous to the opening of the railway, at once quadrupled, notwithstanding that the speed had only increased in the ratio from nine to seventeen miles an hour, the number of trains being six a day in each direction. By 1837, when the average speed had increased to 25 miles an hour, this quadrupling had increased seven-fold: at the present time the maximum running speed on this portion of the London and North-Western Railway is forty miles an hour—the average speed of trains is about twenty-seven miles, and on week-days there are sixteen trains in each direction, on Sundays six. Yet there are now three competing lines to that of the London and North-Western between Liverpool and Manchester.