Darlington is thus a place entirely inimical to coaching interests and memories. Here, on its pedestal, stands the first of the iron monsters that killed the coaches, and the town itself largely lives by manufacturing railway wagons and iron and steel bridges. But coaching had had its day, and did not die untimely. A few years longer and the great highroads, already inconveniently crowded, must have been widened to accommodate the increased traffic. Railways have been beneficent in many directions, and they have enabled many hundreds of thousands to live in the country who would otherwise have been pent in stuffy streets. Imagination fails in the task of endeavouring to picture what the roads would have been like to-day if road-travel had remained the only means of communication. Locomotion would have been immensely restricted, of course; but the mere increase of population must have brought huge crowds of additional passengers. Figures are commonly said to be dry, but they can occasionally be eloquent enough. For instance, when we compare the population of the United Kingdom in 1837, when the Queen came to the throne, and now, and consider the bearing of those figures on this question, they are more than eloquent, and are even startling. There were twenty-five and a half millions of persons in these islands in the first year of Victoria’s reign. There are now forty-nine millions. Over twenty-three millions of persons most of whom would have used the roads, added in eighty years! Of course, the opportunities for cheap and quick travel have made frequent travellers of those who otherwise would never or rarely have stirred from their homes; but railways have wrought greater changes than that. What, let us think, would have been the present-day position of the city of London without railways? It must needs have remained largely what it was when the “short stages” conveyed such citizens as did not live in the city to and from their residences in the suburbs, which then extended no further than Highgate, Chiswick, Norwood, and Stockwell. A stage-coach commonly held sixteen persons, twelve outside and four in; and allowing for those who might manage to walk into the city, how many of such coaches should we require nowadays, supposing railways suddenly abolished, to convey the city’s myriad day population? So many thousands that the task would be impossible. The impossibility of it gives us at once the measure of the railways’ might, and raises them from the mere carriers we generally think them to the height of all-powerful social forces whose effects may be sought in every detail of our lives. To them the wide-spreading suburbs directly owe their existence, equally as the deserted main roads of yester-year owed their loneliness to the same cause; and social scientists have it that they have performed what may at first sight seem a miracle: that, in fact, they have increased the population. If railways had not come to