"Then as to goods. The only goods that require velocity in coming to London, are ribands from Coventry. Half the luggage room of a coach, on a Saturday night, is quite adequate to the conveyance of them. The manufacturers of Coventry will never be such fools as to send their property on an errand by which it must travel further and fare worse. For heavy goods, the saving by canal would be as twelve to one, beside the perfect safety. In the canal boat there is no danger of fracture, even to the most delicate goods; whereas, if fine China goods were to be brought by the rapid waggons, the breakage would probably be twenty-five per cent. "As to the profits of the undertaking let us be extravagantly liberal. Suppose that the Railway was to get one-third of the goods, as well as one- third of the passengers, see what they would make of it:-- One-third of the Goods . . . 96,540 pounds One-third of the Passengers . 30,240 -------- 126,780 pounds -------- Annual expenses . . . . . 385,000 pounds Returns. . . . . . . . 126,780 -------- Annual deficiency . . . . 258,220 pounds -------- To meet an outlay of 7,500,000 pounds. "But the probability is that canals would reduce their rates one-half; and thus, competing wholesomely, extinguish the railway. The coach-masters would do the same thing--run for twelve months at half the present fares, and then not one man in his senses would risk his bones on the railway. The innkeepers would follow a course precisely similar, and give nice smoking dinners, foaming tankards and bottles of beeswing at so cheap a rate, and meet their customers with so good humoured faces, and do so many of those kind offices that legions would flock to the hospitable road. And while all this was going on, and the thousands of men which the authors of this ridiculous scheme had expected to send upon the parish were thriving, the solitary stranger who had nobody to tell him better would go swinging at the tail of the engine, bumping first on the iron plates on this side and then on the iron plates on that side; and if he escaped being scalded to death by the bursting of his engine, or having all his bones broken by collision with another, he would be fain to rest for the night within some four bare walls and gnaw a mouldy crust which he brought in his pocket, or, as an alternative of luxury, wade some ten miles through the mire, and feast upon a rasher of rusty bacon and a tankard of the smallest ale at the nearest hedge alehouse."