Adding the 604,000 passengers of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the proportion of land travellers to the whole population of the kingdom, in 1837, was not quite a sixth. The passengers who travelled on only thirty-one miles of railway were nearly one-sixth of all that travelled by all the mail coaches, stage coaches, post cars, post chaises, private carriages with post horses, waggons, and canal boats, over all the high roads, post roads, and the canals of the United Kingdom. Observe the onward progress of land passenger development. No railways of the slightest importance were finished between 1830 and 1837, but by the year 1843—two years and a-half after the Great Western line had been completed between London and Bristol—1,902 miles of railway had been opened for traffic, and in the year terminating at that date, 23,466,896 passengers were carried by railway. These were, of course, exclusive of those conveyed by mail and stage coaches, and other conveyances. Their numbers could not have diminished, on the contrary, they must have increased, seeing that these conveyances then began to be used in subordination, as it were, to railways, and not as the arterial and leading means of passenger communication. Travellers went shorter distances by them—nevertheless what used to be called the “post horse duty,” that is the tax levied upon public conveyances and horses employed in passenger traffic, never diminished—on the contrary, it increased slightly during several years. For some time past it has been modified in many of its features, so that a comparison between its amount, and what it was in 1837, cannot be instituted. But the fact is notorious, that even now, with upwards of 14,000 miles of railway open throughout the kingdom, many more horses are employed in connection with passenger traffic than there were in 1837. The number of persons who travelled by railway in the year ending 30th June, 1843, was 23,466,896: the number estimated by road, 3,359,825, total 26,826,721. As the estimated population of the United Kingdom in June, 1843, was 27,033,692, it follows that it and the number of persons who had travelled in the previous twelve months, both by rail and by road, were not far from equal. In fact the number of persons who travelled by railway may be considered to represent the _excess_ of travelling in 1843 over that in 1837. Let it here be noted, that in 1843, the third class passengers formed not more than a fourth of the total number carried, they being 6,891,844. We shall see presently how marvellously these numbers have progressed, not only absolutely, but in comparison with the travellers of the two other classes.