The Times — London, Saturday, January 22, 1831
It is now something more than four months since the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was opened to the public; and the question which was then asked in a spirit of curiosity is beginning to be asked in a spirit of anxiety. Will the locomotive engine, having proved that it can carry the merchant of Manchester to his counting-house in Liverpool and home again to dinner, go on to supersede the stage-coach upon every great road in the kingdom, the barge upon every canal, and the coasting-vessel upon every tide? Or is the Lancashire line, as its detractors insist, a single and singular case—a level thirty miles between two of the richest towns in Europe—from which nothing can be inferred as to the hills of Derbyshire, the clays of Bedfordshire, or the purse of the nation? We propose this morning to state the case as it stands, to give the friends and the enemies of the iron road each their fair hearing, and to say plainly at the close where, in our judgment, the truth lies. The matter is of more consequence than the fortunes of a company of Liverpool merchants. It touches the employment of some tens of thousands of His Majesty’s subjects, the value of some tens of millions of property, and the habits of the whole people.
The reader who has followed the controversy only since the fatal 15th of September may not know how old it is, nor how confidently the wise were lately of the contrary opinion. As long ago as 1820 a Mr. Thomas Gray, then of Nottingham, published his Observations on a General Iron Railway, in which he proposed nothing less than a land steam conveyance to supersede the necessity of horses in all public carriages, and dismissed the turnpike-road, the canal and the coasting-trader together as pitiful methods of conveyance. Mr. Gray memorialised Lord Sidmouth, the Lord Mayor, Lord Liverpool and Mr. Peel in turn; he was pronounced a bore by those who received his letters and cracked by those who knew him; and the Quarterly Review, in the spring of 1825, disposed of him and his kind in a sentence, declaring that as to those persons who speculated on making railways generally throughout the kingdom, and superseding all the canals, waggons, mails, stage-coaches and post-chaises, and in short every other mode of conveyance by land and by water, it deemed them and their visionary schemes unworthy of notice. The same Review found it palpably absurd and ridiculous that a locomotive should travel twice as fast as a stage-coach, thought the people of Woolwich would as soon suffer themselves to be fired off upon one of Congreve’s ricochet rockets as trust themselves to such a machine, and expressed the hope that Parliament would limit the speed of every railway it sanctioned to eight or nine miles an hour. Nor was this the opinion of literary men only. Mr. Nicholas Wood, of Killingworth, whose Treatise on Rail-roads is the text-book of the art, wrote in the same year that nothing could do more harm to their adoption than the promulgation of such nonsense as engines travelling at twelve, sixteen, eighteen or twenty miles an hour. We do not recall these passages to mock their authors, who wrote according to the lights of their day, but to remind our readers how recently those lights pointed the other way, and to counsel some modesty in those who now pronounce with equal assurance in the opposite sense.
The Liverpool proprietors went to Parliament in 1825 with a subscribed capital of £400,000 and Mr. George Stephenson as their engineer. They were met by the Bridgewater trustees and the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, by Lords Derby and Sefton, whose lands the line was to cross, and by Mr. Alderson—now Mr. Justice Alderson—whose cross-examination of Mr. Stephenson before the Committee of the House of Commons is not yet forgotten in Westminster Hall. The engineer’s levels were wrong; his bridge over the Irwell would not have passed the flood-water; his proposal to carry the line across Chat Moss was described by counsel as ignorance almost inconceivable and perfect madness; and the witness himself has since confessed that he was not long in the box before he began to wish for a hole to creep out at. The Bill was lost. A fresh survey by the Messrs. Rennie and Mr. Vignoles, a new line, and a good deal of politic conciliation of the landed interest produced the Act of 1826; and then, when the works were far advanced, the Company found itself uncertain what was to draw the carriages when they were made. Messrs. Walker and Rastrick, sent in 1829 to examine the collieries of the North, reported in favour of fixed engines and ropes; Mr. Robert Stephenson and Mr. Locke replied for the locomotive; and the Directors, unable to decide between the engineers, referred the question to the only tribunal from which there is no appeal—a public trial at Rainhill in October of that year, with a premium of £500 for any engine of not more than six tons which should draw three times its own weight at ten miles an hour. Five engines were entered. Two never fairly started; the Novelty of Messrs. Braithwaite and Ericsson, the favourite of the crowd, broke down; Mr. Hackworth’s Sans Pareil failed at the cylinder; and Mr. Stephenson’s Rocket alone fulfilled the conditions, drawing its load at fourteen miles an hour and running unloaded at nearly thirty. From that week the question of the fixed engine was at an end, and the question of the railway began.
What followed on the 15th of September the whole kingdom knows. Eight trains; the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel and a great part of the Ministry; a concourse upon the banks and bridges beyond all counting; and, at Parkside, where the engines stopped for water, the late Mr. Huskisson stepping down from the ducal carriage to take the Duke’s hand, and struck by the Rocket as it came up upon the other line. He was carried to Eccles upon the Northumbrian, Mr. Stephenson himself at the engine, at a speed which those who timed it put at six-and-thirty miles in the hour—the fastest that men have yet travelled upon the earth, and travelled, by a bitter irony, in the vain hope of saving the life which the same power had destroyed. He died that evening. The Duke, who had been disposed to abandon the day, was persuaded to go on to Manchester, where the reception of his Grace by the populace was such as to remind the company that there are other questions agitating the country besides railways. We mention these things not to renew a painful subject, but because the enemies of the railway have not been slow to found upon them, and because its friends must meet them.
Before we weigh the arguments, it may be of service to the general reader to explain, as plainly as the matter admits, in what the new power consists; for a great deal that is said on both sides proceeds from persons who have never seen an engine and would not know a boiler from a chimney. The advantage of the railway is not in the engine at all, but in the rail. A carriage upon a common road, however well Mr. Macadam has made it, sinks a little into the surface at every yard and must be lifted out of it at every yard; upon a smooth bar of iron the wheel neither sinks nor rises, and the resistance to be overcome is reduced to a small fraction of what it was. It is an old observation at the collieries of the Tyne that a single horse will draw upon an iron road what eight or ten will draw upon the turnpike, and the earlier railways of the North, of which there are many, are worked to this hour by horses walking beside the waggons. The locomotive engine is nothing but a means of applying to this favourable road a more powerful and less costly horse. It is a steam-engine of the ordinary kind, set upon wheels, which turns those wheels by its own pistons and so draws itself and whatever is coupled behind it. Its peculiarity, and the discovery which made the Rocket what it was, is that the fire does not heat the water through the bottom of a single great vessel, as in the boiler of a mill, but is carried through the water in a bundle of five-and-twenty copper tubes, so that a boiler which a man may almost span with his arms generates in a minute steam enough to have supplied a Cornish engine of the last age for an hour. The waste steam from the cylinders is discharged up the chimney, and in going draws the fire after it, so that the faster the engine runs the fiercer it burns. The fuel is coke, which the Company’s Act obliges it to use, that the engine may, in the words of the statute, consume its own smoke; and the whole is guided by no rein and no rudder, but simply by the flanges of the wheels upon the rails, which lie throughout the line at the same distance apart—four feet eight inches and a half—that Mr. Stephenson found upon the colliery roads of his youth.
Two things must be added, because they are the foundation of half the objections we shall have to consider. The first is that this smooth wheel upon a smooth rail, which is the whole secret of the economy, is also the whole secret of the weakness. The engine holds the rail by nothing but its own weight; upon a level it will draw a hundred tons, upon a rise of one foot in a hundred it will draw a third of that, and upon a rise of one in twenty it will draw little but itself, if indeed it does not slip and stand still. Hence Mr. Stephenson’s inflexible rule that a railway must be level or nearly so; hence the cutting of two miles through the sandstone at Olive Mount, the embankment across the Sankey valley upon nine arches seventy feet in the air, the floating of the line upon hurdles and heather across the bottomless moss that Mr. Alderson made so merry with; and hence the enormous and unlooked-for cost of the whole, which the prospectus of 1824 put at £400,000, the amended prospectus of 1825 at £510,000, and the Treasurer’s account at the opening at £820,000, with more to come. The second is that the engine is a delicate and a thirsty thing. It stops twice for water in the thirty miles; its tubes leak and its axles heat; a frost cracks its rails and a fall of snow, if it be deep, stops it altogether; and it requires at every point of the line a class of men—engine-men, firemen, plate-layers, policemen with their flags—who did not exist five years ago and who must be made before the line can be worked. A railway is not a road upon which any man may put his own carriage. It is a machine thirty miles long, of which every part must be in order at once.
So much for the instrument; now for what it has done. The Company’s returns, which are printed weekly in the Liverpool papers and which we have no reason to distrust, show that in the fifteen weeks from the opening to the end of December about seventy thousand persons were carried between the two towns, or between six and seven hundred in the day, Sundays included; and that on the busiest days of the autumn the number rose above a thousand. Let the reader set this against what went before. There ran between Liverpool and Manchester, until September last, twenty-two regular and some seven occasional coaches, which, full inside and out, could carry between them fewer than seven hundred persons in a day. The railway, that is to say, is already carrying more people than the whole coaching establishment of the road could have carried had every seat been taken on every journey; and it is carrying them in an hour and three-quarters against the coaches’ four, for seven shillings in the close carriages and four in the open, against the coaches’ ten and five. Of the six-and-twenty coaches, we are informed that above half have already been taken off, and that the remainder are kept upon the road chiefly for the parcels. The mails, since the 11th of November, have gone by the railway, and the Post Office, we understand, pays the Company a third of what it paid the contractors. The canal proprietors, who for a generation had felt no occasion to lower their charges, and who assured the Committee of 1825 that the trade of the two towns was perfectly well accommodated, have reduced their rates for merchandise since the railway opened—and reduced them, it is worth remarking, before the railway had carried a bale; for the Company, having only engines enough for its passengers, did not begin to carry goods until the first week of December, when the Planet, a new and heavier engine from Mr. Stephenson’s manufactory at Newcastle, drew its first train of cotton to Manchester. The Company’s shares, which were to be had at par a twelvemonth since, now command a premium which we forbear to name lest we be thought to puff them. These are the facts, and they are not disputed by anybody. What is disputed is what they prove.
The friends of the railway say that they prove everything. Mr. Booth, the Treasurer of the Company, whose Account of the undertaking, published in the summer, is the most candid document any projector has yet given to the public, puts the matter with a force we cannot improve. The most striking result of the completion of the line, he says, is the sudden change effected in our ideas of time and space: what was quick is now slow, what was distant is now near; and the man of business in Manchester may breakfast at home, proceed to Liverpool by the railway, transact his business, and return to Manchester before dinner. Grant this for thirty miles, say the enthusiasts, and you have granted it for three hundred. Lay the iron road from London to Birmingham, as a company is now forming to do, and from Birmingham to the Lancashire line, as others propose, and the manufacturer of Manchester dines in London the day he leaves his mill, the letter written in the capital on Monday is answered from Liverpool on Tuesday, and the whole island is drawn together into a compass which a man may traverse between one Sunday and the next. Coals, which cost at the pit’s mouth a fifth of what they cost in the London cellar, will travel at a farthing a ton the mile, and the poor man’s hearth will be the gainer; the produce of the farm will reach the market before it spoils; the Post Office will carry a letter from London to Edinburgh in a day and a night; troops may be moved to any point of the coast in a few hours, and the country defended by a fraction of the establishment now thought necessary. This is the case of the enthusiasts, and it is a strong case; for every article of it has been in some degree exemplified in Lancashire, and those who laughed at Mr. Gray in 1820 are not now in a position to laugh at anybody.
The enemies of the railway—and we use the word without reproach, for they are many, respectable, and not all interested—answer in this manner. The Lancashire line, they say, is not a specimen of railways but a freak of geography. Two towns of a hundred and fifty thousand souls apiece, whose whole trade passes between them, lie thirty miles apart across a country nearly level; the canal that joined them was a monopoly and behaved as monopolies do; and yet even here the undertaking cost twice its estimate, took six years from the first prospectus to the first train, and has yet to declare its first dividend. Where else in England are two such towns so placed? Between London and Birmingham lie a hundred and twelve miles of hill and vale; between Birmingham and Bristol the Cotswold; between London and the North the whole ridge of the Midland counties. Mr. Stephenson’s level line, carried across such a country, means cuttings, tunnels and embankments to which Olive Mount and Chat Moss are child’s-play, at a cost which nobody has computed because nobody dares. The capital of the Lancashire company was found among the merchants of two rich towns for a single object under their own eyes. Whence is to come the capital for a general system? If a railway costs, as this one has, some £26,000 a mile, then two thousand miles of railway—and Mr. Gray’s map shows more—would require fifty millions sterling, which is a sixteenth of the National Debt and about a year’s revenue of the kingdom. The country subscribed, they remind us, to a good many projects in the year 1825, of which there are gentlemen in the Gazette to this day; and if the merchants of Manchester choose to risk their money the merchants of Manchester may, but Parliament should be slow to let loose upon a credulous public a second mania of the same sort, with iron for its pretext instead of Peruvian mines.
Nor, they say, is the coach the doomed and helpless thing it is painted. The roads of England were never so good as at this hour: Mr. Telford’s Holyhead road, Mr. Macadam’s surfaces and the emulation of the coach-masters have brought London within nineteen hours of Manchester, and the mails run their ten miles in the hour with a punctuality that Europe admires. The coach goes where the passenger lives, takes him up at his own door and sets him down at every village between; the railway goes from one terminus to another and leaves him to find his way to it. If steam is to be the power, why should it be confined to a road of iron at £26,000 a mile, when Mr. Gurney has driven his steam-carriage from London to Bath and back upon the common turnpike, and gentlemen in Gloucestershire are preparing to run such carriages daily between Cheltenham and Gloucester upon a road that is already made and paid for? As for goods, the canals of England—some four thousand miles of them, made at a cost of twenty millions and more—carry the heavy merchandise of the kingdom, its coals, its corn, its timber and its iron, at rates with which no engine that must be fed with coke and mended every week can long compete; and as to the coasting-trade, the Newcastle collier that brings its three hundred tons to the Pool for a few shillings a ton is in no more danger from the Rocket than from the moon. And there is the matter of the human frame. Nobody now pretends that the passenger will be suffocated or that the countryside will be set on fire; but it was a Privy Councillor who lay dead at Eccles on the evening of the 15th of September, and it was the very speed which the enthusiasts most applaud that killed him. A coach that overturns at ten miles an hour breaks a limb; the same accident at thirty must be another thing altogether; and the public, say the objectors, has not yet been told, because nobody yet knows, what the meeting of two such trains would be.
We come now to the question which, in the present state of the country, weighs with us more than any other, and which the projectors of railways have been a great deal too ready to pass over in a sentence—what is to become of the men? The coaching establishment of England is not a trifle. It is computed that there run upon the roads of Great Britain some seven hundred mails and above three thousand stage-coaches; that they employ, as coachmen, guards, horse-keepers and ostlers, some thirty thousand men; and that the horses which draw them, at a fresh team every ten miles, are not fewer than a hundred and fifty thousand—beasts which must be bred on somebody’s farm, shod at somebody’s forge, and fed with somebody’s oats and hay. Behind these stand the inn-keepers of every posting town from Barnet to Berwick, the post-boys, the coach-builders, the harness-makers and the saddlers, the turnpike trusts with their tollgates and their bonded debt of some seven millions which the tolls were to have discharged, and the proprietors of the canals with their boatmen and their lock-keepers. The agricultural interest has already made its own reckoning, and reckons that if the horse goes the market for oats goes with him. Now on the single road between Liverpool and Manchester, in four months, above half the coaches have been taken off. Multiply that by the roads of England and you have the objectors’ picture; and it is idle to pretend that it is drawn from nothing.
The season, moreover, is not one in which any thinking man can treat the displacement of labour by machinery as a mere question of arithmetic. Our columns for these two months past have been filled with the proceedings of the Special Commissions at Winchester, Salisbury, Reading, Abingdon, Dorchester and Aylesbury, before which above a thousand of the labouring poor of the southern counties have been tried for breaking the threshing-machines of their employers, of whom some have been left for execution and some hundreds ordered for transportation. Whatever we may think of the guilt of these men—and we have said what we think—no one who has read the evidence can doubt what moved them. The threshing-machine took the winter’s work out of the labourer’s hands and put nothing in its place; the farmer got his corn out cheaper; the parish got the labourer; and the labourer, when the parish would not have him, got the machine by the flail-end and broke it. The learned Judge at Salisbury told two of these men, in passing sentence, that they might in the perversion of their understanding think the machines detrimental to them, but that their labour could not ultimately be hurt by the employment of machinery. We hope his Lordship is right; we believe that in the long run he is right; but we are bound to remark that the late Mr. Ricardo, who understood these matters as well as any man who ever lived, went to his grave convinced, and said in the last edition of his Principles, that the substitution of machinery for human labour is often very injurious to the interests of the class of labourers, and that the opinion entertained by the labouring class upon the subject is not founded on prejudice and error, but is conformable to the correct principles of political economy. Ultimately is a great word in the mouth of a Judge, and a very small one in the mouth of a man whose children want bread this winter.
Having said this, we must in fairness say the rest, for the case is not all one way. The railway destroys one kind of employment and creates another, and it is by no means clear that the second is smaller than the first. The Lancashire line employed, in the making, some thousands of labourers for four years, at wages which the farm never paid; it employs now, in the working, a body of engine-men, firemen, guards, porters, clerks, plate-layers and policemen which did not exist and is paid better than the men it displaced; and it has given to the iron-founders of Staffordshire and the North, to the coal-owners of Lancashire, to the coke-burners, the brick-makers and the quarrymen, a demand they never had. The coachman of the Liverpool road is thrown out of employ; but the coachman of the roads that feed the railway is not, for the traveller from Bolton or Warrington who would have gone the whole way behind horses now goes behind horses to the nearest point of the line, and there are more such travellers than there were. It is at least possible—we put it no higher—that the railway will not diminish the number of horses in England but increase them; since every man carried to a terminus must be carried from his door to it and from it to his door, and since the produce that now rots for want of a market will require carting when it has one. The whole history of the cotton manufacture is before us as a lesson. The hand-loom weaver has suffered, and suffers, cruelly; but the number of persons fed by the trade that was to have ruined them is ten times what it was when Arkwright began. Ultimately, as the learned Judge says, these things right themselves. Our quarrel with the projectors is that they say ultimately and mean now; our quarrel with the objectors is that they say now and mean never.
There remain the consequences to society at large, about which more nonsense is talked than about all the rest together. It is objected by some gentlemen of rank and property that the railway will unsettle the lower orders by making it easy and cheap for them to move about; that the labourer who can be in Liverpool for four shillings will be in Liverpool when he should be at his plough; that the country will be overrun with idlers, the towns with strangers, and the coverts with poachers. It is objected by others, of a graver sort, that the Company runs its trains upon the Lord’s Day, with an interval during the hours of divine service which they think an aggravation rather than an excuse. It is objected that the seclusion of the gentleman’s park is to be violated by a road over which he has no more control than over the weather; that his cattle will not graze nor his horses stand within sound of the engine; and that a spark from the chimney will fire his ricks—an apprehension which the autumn of 1830 has made men less inclined to smile at than they were. On the other side it is said, with equal confidence, that the railway will be the greatest engine of civilisation since the printing-press; that it will carry the London newspaper to Manchester on the day of its publication and so make one public opinion of a whole nation; that it will break down the provincial jealousies which divide Englishman from Englishman; that the artisan of the town will see the country and the labourer of the country the town; and that a people who can meet will not long consent to be governed as a people who cannot. We do not know which of these prophecies to believe, and we suspect that nobody does. We observe only that every one of them was made, in nearly the same words, of the turnpike-road, the canal and the mail-coach, and that the country has survived all three.
How long, then, and how far? Here we must ask the reader to attend to dates rather than to declamation. Mr. Gray published in 1820. The Stockton and Darlington Company obtained its Act in 1821 and opened in 1825, and its engines to this day share the road with horses. The Liverpool and Manchester Company was formed in 1824, lost its Bill in 1825, obtained its Act in 1826, and opened in 1830—ten years from the pamphlet to the passenger, six from the prospectus—and the undertaking meanwhile swallowed twice its estimate and, for a season, the credit of every engineer in England. There are now open in the kingdom, of railways worked by locomotive engines, something under a hundred miles; and there are projected, in various states of forwardness, a line from London to Birmingham, lines from Birmingham to the Lancashire railway, a line from Leeds to Selby, a line from Newcastle to Carlisle, and a hundred schemes upon paper which will never leave it. Every one of these must go before Parliament, and Parliament, as the Lancashire proprietors found to their cost, is slow, dear and uncertain, while the landowners who oppose it are neither slow nor uncertain. Every one of them must find its capital in a country which has not forgotten 1825. Every one of them must be surveyed, levelled, cut, embanked, tunnelled and laid by a profession which five years ago did not exist and which cannot be multiplied faster than young men can be trained. We shall be thought timid by the enthusiasts and rash by their opponents when we say that we look to see the great towns of the kingdom—London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Bristol, perhaps Edinburgh—joined by iron roads within the working lifetime of men now in their prime, say twenty years; and that we do not look to see, in that time or in twice that time, the railway carried to every market town, or the coach driven from every road, or the barge from every canal. The iron road will follow trade, as the canal followed it, to the places where trade is thick enough to pay for £26,000 a mile; and where trade is thin the horse will keep the road, as the pack-horse kept the hills long after the waggon had the plain.
And now for our own judgment, which we have promised and to which the reader is entitled. We think the enemies of the railway have the better of the argument upon almost every particular, and the worse of it upon the whole. They are right that the Lancashire line is a favoured case; right that the capital of a general system is beyond anything the country has yet ventured upon a single object; right that the coach is at the summit of its perfection and the canal unrivalled for the heaviest goods; right that Parliament is likely to be foolish and projectors likely to be rogues; and right, above all, that the men whom the machine displaces will not be comforted by being told that their grandchildren will be the richer for it. But they are wrong in the one thing that matters, which is the direction of the tide. A power which carries a thousand persons a day between two towns for less money and in less than half the time; which has taken half the coaches off the road in four months; which has brought a monopoly of a generation’s standing to lower its charges without carrying a bale—this is not a power that will stop at Lancashire because Lancashire happens to be convenient to it. It will go wherever there is trade enough to feed it, and it will go there whether the Quarterly Review approves or not. The coach will die upon the great roads and live upon the small; the canal will be humbled and not destroyed; the sea will keep its own; the horse, we incline to believe, will be more numerous in 1860 than in 1830, though he will be found in the shafts of a cart oftener than in the traces of a mail; and the whole will take a generation rather than a session. The duty of the Legislature is neither to force the change nor to forbid it, but to see that the roads are made where they are wanted and not merely where the projector wants them; that the capital is real and not a puff; that the public is protected against the negligence of companies as it is now against the negligence of coachmen; and that the men whom the change throws upon the parish are not left to learn political economy from a Special Commission. If this be done, we believe the country will look back upon the iron road as it now looks back upon the turnpike, and wonder what the noise was about. If it be not done, we shall have the noise without the road, and deserve it.
Postscript from the Editor, September 2026
The leading article above never appeared in The Times. It is a composition in the voice of January 1831, but nothing in it is invented except the voice: the figures, the names and the quotations are those of the record. The Quarterly Review really did dismiss general railways and their advocates as unworthy of notice and call locomotives at twice coach speed palpably absurd; Booth really did write that what was quick is now slow, what was distant is now near; Ricardo really did conclude that the labouring class’s fear of machinery was conformable to the correct principles of political economy; the Annual Register really did record twenty-two coaches carrying at most 688 a day where the railway carried an average of 1,070, with all but one coach gone; and the Swing rioters really were tried by the hundred that winter for breaking threshing machines. The reader will by now have supplied the modern nouns without our help. The locomotive is the large language model; the level iron road at £26,000 a mile is the data centre; Mr. Gray and his general iron railway are those who promise a general intelligence within the decade; the Quarterly is every eminent voice that declared, quite recently, that the thing could never write a coherent paragraph; the Bridgewater trustees cutting their rates before a bale was carried are the incumbent software houses cutting theirs; Mr. Huskisson is the safety incident that the sceptics found upon and the enthusiasts must answer; the coaching interest with its thirty thousand men and its oats is the clerk, the paralegal, the junior analyst and the programmer; the Salisbury judge’s ultimately is the economist’s; the year 1825 is the sums of capital, measured now in hundreds of billions, committed to computing capacity before the revenue exists; and the Special Commissions are what happens when a society lets the displaced learn political economy the hard way. What actually followed is worth knowing. The trunk lines did join the great towns within twenty years; by 1850 Britain had some six thousand miles of railway. The coaching trade at its 1835 zenith still ran 700 mails and 3,300 coaches with 150,000 horses and 30,000 men; the last London coach ceased in 1846. The canals were humbled, largely by being bought. The number of horses in Britain went on rising until about 1900, exactly as the leader-writer guessed and for the reasons he gave. The mania he feared arrived on schedule in 1845–47 and ruined thousands; the railways it built nonetheless remained. And the coachmen of 1831 were not, in the main, the men who became engine-drivers. Both camps, in other words, were right—the sceptics about nearly every particular and the enthusiasts about the direction—and both were wrong about time, the sceptics thinking it would never come and the enthusiasts thinking it had already arrived. Whether artificial intelligence will follow the same curve nobody in 2026 can know, any more than a leader-writer in 1831 could; but the shape of the argument now raging—over capability and diffusion, capital and mania, displacement and compensation, safety and speed, and above all over what ultimately is permitted to mean to a man whose employment ends this winter—is not merely similar to the railway debate. It is the same debate, with the nouns changed.