It was “golden” chiefly from the sportsman’s point of view, and in the opinions of those who found a keen delight in the perfection of coach-building and harness-making, in the smartness of the beautiful horses, and in the speed attained. From the sordid view-point of the profit-and-loss account, although this was the age in which Chaplin and a few others made their great fortunes, it was a time when the high speed and other refinements of travelling made the path of the coach-proprietor a thorny and uneasy one, often barren of aught but honour. “You are ‘in it,’ I see,” said a proprietor who himself had been severely bitten in this way, and had left the business, to a coachman who, like many of his fellows, had long cherished an ambition to become a coach-master, and had just acquired a share: “you are ‘in it.’ Take care how you get out of it.” One of the prominent men in it--Cooper, who ran a good line of coaches on the Bath Road--found himself at last in the Bankruptcy Court, and many smaller men appeared in the same place. The greatest increase of cost was in the item of horses. In earlier times the stock had lasted for years, despite the long stages and harder pulling; but in this period of good roads and short stages, when, all things being equal, a team should have lasted longer, the great coach-proprietors found it necessary to renew their stock every three years. Chaplin’s method of doing this was to replace one-third of his horses every year. It is not to be supposed that the horses thus disposed of were always broken down or worn out by their three years of strenuous exertion in the fast coaches. They had only lost those agile qualities necessary for that use, and, finding purchasers among farmers and country tradesmen who had no occasion to gallop at eleven miles an hour, lived very comfortably, grew sleek and fat, and must often, from roadside paddocks, have beheld their successors slaving away in the fast coaches; finding much satisfaction in their own altered circumstances. Coachmen at this time usually drove between thirty and forty miles out, and then took the up coach back, perhaps more than half a day later. With such an arrangement the horses had the same driver, and it was generally found that they worked much better in such cases. The coachman’s responsibility for their condition was also undivided, and the proprietor was easily able to weed out from his coachmen those who lingered at the changes and made up the lost time on the road, to the distress of their teams. It was Chaplin who made it known, by all the vigorous language at his command, that any one of his coachmen found in the possession of one of those instruments of torture, resembling a cat-o’-nine-tails, for punishing horses, and known as a “short Tommy” would be instantly dismissed. Chaplin’s direct influence and interests may be said to have described a radius of from forty to fifty miles