(184.) Capital and skill have of late years been directed with extraordinary energy to the improvement of inland transport; and this important instrument of national wealth and civilisation has received a proportionate impulse. Effects are now witnessed, which, had they been narrated a few years [Pg329] since, could only have been admitted into the pages of fiction or volumes of romance. Who could have credited the possibility of a ponderous engine of iron, loaded with some hundred passengers, in a train of carriages of corresponding magnitude, and a large quantity of water and coal, taking flight from Manchester and arriving at Liverpool, a distance of above thirty miles, in little more than an hour? And yet this is a matter of daily and almost hourly occurrence. The rapidity of transport thus attained is not less wonderful than the weights transported. Its capabilities in this respect far transcend the exigencies even of the two greatest commercial marts in Great Britain. Loads, varying from fifty to one hundred and fifty tons, are transported at the average rate of fifteen miles an hour; and in one instance we have seen a load—we should rather say a _cargo_—of waggons, conveying merchandise to the amount of two hundred and thirty tons gross, transported from Liverpool to Manchester at the average rate of twelve miles an hour. The astonishment with which such performances must be viewed, might be qualified, if the art of transport by steam on railways had been matured, and had attained that full state of perfection which such an art is always capable of receiving from long experience, aided by great scientific knowledge, and the unbounded application of capital. But such is not the present case. The art of constructing locomotive engines, so far from having attained a state of maturity, has not even emerged from its infancy. So complete was the ignorance of its powers which prevailed, even among engineers, previous to the opening of the Liverpool railway, that the transport of heavy goods was regarded as the chief object of the undertaking, and its principal source of revenue. The incredible speed of transport, effected even in the very first experiments in 1830, burst upon the public, and on the scientific world, with all the effect of a new and unlooked-for phenomenon. On the unfortunate occasion which deprived this country of Mr. Huskisson, the wounded body of that statesman was transported a distance of about fifteen miles in twenty-five minutes, being at the rate of thirty-six miles an hour. The revenue of the road arising from passengers since its opening, [Pg330] has, contrary to all that was foreseen, been nearly double that which has been derived from merchandise. So great was the want of experience in the construction of engines, that the company was at first ignorant whether they should adopt large steam engines fixed at different stations on the line, to pull the carriages from station