Manchester was the great manufacturing center of the industrial England, which the inventions of Arkwright and Watt had called into existence. Its port was Liverpool. The natural means of communication between the two cities was quite inadequate to the changed conditions. In 1821 surveys were made for a tramway, and before the Stockton road was completed Stephenson had been selected as chief engineer of the new and more ambitious enterprise. Yet his assertion that trains could be moved between the two cities at twenty miles an hour raised serious doubts in many minds as to his sanity. A writer in the "Quarterly Review" thought that even though a few foolhardy persons might trust themselves to a vehicle moving at such speed--twice that of the swiftest stagecoaches--Parliament for the general welfare should limit the speed of all railways to eight or nine miles an hour, as the greatest that could be ventured on with safety. It was while the grant of a charter to this Liverpool and Manchester Railway was being discussed in a committee of the House of Commons that the shrewd North Country engineer first faced the trained Parliamentary lawyers. He had been cautioned to keep his figures for speed within the most moderate limits so as not to prejudice the company's case, but his belief in his own invention mastered his restraint, though as he afterward said, he did his best "to keep the engine down to ten miles an hour." In fact, his daring prediction of twelve miles per hour struck the learned counsel with horror. They objected that horses would fly in terror from such a monster. He replied that horses had been known to shy at wheelbarrows. They tried to make him admit that the wheels would slip on the smooth rails, but he knew that they would bite without teeth. One of the committee said, "Suppose that a cow were to stray upon the line and get in the way of the engine; would not that be a very awkward circumstance?" To which the countryman had a ready reply, "Very awkward--for the cow!" The opposition, which was largely animated by the existing canal interest, ventured some views which the experience of the next five years was to make most ridiculous. They declared that the plan to carry the rails over the surveyed route across Chat Moss, a wide morass, was impossible; and furthermore, that no locomotive could make headway against the high winds which at times prevailed in that region. Experts were brought to testify that "no engineer in his senses would go through Chat Moss if he wanted to make a railroad from Liverpool to Manchester." "In my judgment," said one of them, "a railroad cannot be made over Chat Moss without going to the bottom." The committee decided against the bill, but at the next session Parliament granted the company the power to construct the road, the question whether or not locomotives should be used upon it being left in abeyance. George Stephenson was chosen to be chief engineer, at one thousand pounds a year.