“Talk of _ladies_ on board a steamboat or in a railroad car--_there are none_. I never feel like a gentlemen there, and I can not perceive a semblance of gentility in any one who makes part of the traveling mob. When I see women whom, in their drawing-rooms or elsewhere, I have been accustomed to respect and treat with every suitable deference--when I see them, I say, elbowing their way through a crowd of dirty emigrants, or low-bred homespun fellows in petticoats or breeches in our country, in order to reach a table spread for a hundred or more, I lose sight of their pretentions to gentility, and view them as belonging to the plebeian herd. To restore herself to her caste, let a lady move in select company at five miles an hour, and take her meals in comfort at a good inn, where she may dine decently. After all the old-fashioned way of five or six miles, with liberty to dine decently in a decent inn, and be master of one’s movements, with the delight of seeing the country and getting along rationally, is the mode to which I cling, and which will be adopted again by the generations of after times.”[27] Information in regard to railroading in its true sense, was circumscribed to experiment, which retarded the progress of improvement. The belief in lasting solidity, making the expense of building the road-bed more than necessary, so much so that it was estimated in the Eastern States, that about ten miles a year were all one company could properly construct. Most engineers at first fell into the same error--making heavy stone walls for the road-bed. The blocks into which the wooden plugs were driven for the spikes to hold the rails were frequently resting upon solid masonry, four feet high and two and a half feet wide. After done, it was discovered a mistake; that an inelastic road-bed and speed were incompatible and disastrous to the machinery, and the intelligent State of Massachusetts, from the time the first locomotive was put upon the track (March, 1834) until 1841, had shown little advancement in the proper application of steam, as well as construction of road-beds and rails. Robert Fulton expected his discovery would find its highest usefulness as a motive-power on railroads, as it has done; but his brother-in-law and partner did not deem the thing practicable as long as the insuperable objections named existed, and all attempts were passed to others, as the following letter shows, with day and date: “ALBANY, March 1st, 1811,