Part 6

Blucher was almost immediately improved by its inventor. First he doubled the steam-making power of its boiler by turning the exhaust from the cylinders into the smoke-stack, thus creating a forced draught. Second he built another engine, in which the tooth-wheel driving gear gave way to a simple and direct connection between the piston and the driving wheels which rolled upon the rails. This type of locomotive, developing some six miles an hour, did its work so well in the colliery that it was retained, with very slight alterations, for more than half a century. The report of its success got abroad slowly, and Mr. Stephenson was commissioned to build a railway and a number of locomotives for a colliery in another shire. The success of this piece of engineering encouraged him in sending his son Robert, a youth of fine promise, to Edinburgh to study physical sciences in the university, where in his brief residence he took a mathematical prize.

The year 1823 marked another forward step for George Stephenson and railroads. Two years before a road had been chartered to connect the Durham coal-fields with tidewater. Stephenson heard of the project, and at once proposed to the company to make an iron railroad of the new wooden tramway and equip it with his traveling engines. His arguments and demonstrations won over the skeptical directors. They had their charter amended so as to authorize the use of steam as motive power for the transport of passengers as well as merchandise. Thus began the Stockton and Darlington Railway, the first in the world with a passenger charter. The chief engineer was George Stephenson, on a salary of five hundred pounds. At the same time, with the assistance of the railroad people, he founded the locomotive shops at Newcastle.

The new railroad, the first public line, was opened in September, 1825. As its construction progressed, its engineer had become increasingly sanguine of success. He said to his son Robert at this time: "I venture to tell you that I think you will live to see the day when railways will supersede almost all other methods of conveyance in this country--when mail coaches will go by railway, and railroads will become the great highway for the King and all his subjects. The time is coming when it will be cheaper for a workingman to travel upon a railway than to walk on foot. I know there are great and almost unsurmountable difficulties to be encountered, but what I have said will come to pass as sure as you live. I only wish I may live to see the day, though that I can scarcely hope for, as I know how slow all human progress is, and with what difficulty I have been able to get the locomotive thus far adopted, notwithstanding my more than ten years' successful experiment at Killingworth."

The first train over the road was such an one as had never been seen before. George Stephenson was at the lever when the engine pulled out with a string of eight cars behind it. One regular passenger coach--the first ever built--held the directors, and twenty-one improvised passenger "wagons" carried some six hundred daring individuals. Coal and flour filled the other cars. The journey was safely accomplished at a speed which is said at times to have reached the hitherto unheard of rate of twelve miles an hour. The road, with its three Stephenson locomotives and many horses, was successful from the first, and its dividends were among the chief inducements which led to the next and more important advance in railroad construction, the Liverpool and Manchester line.

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.

Chat Moss was conquered by an ingenious device which practically floated the road-bed upon its spongy surface. Tunnels were driven through the hills, deep cuttings were made wherever needed, a ravine was crossed by a viaduct of brick and stone, and more than threescore bridges were thrown across the streams. All the plans for this complicated work passed under the eye, and many of them took their first form in the mind of the chief, whose skill as a mechanic was for the time sunk in his genius for civil engineering. By dint of the most strenuous application, and by the dominance of a spirit of perseverance which no discouragement or obstacle could daunt, Stephenson brought the road to triumphant completion. The next thing was to convince the directors that the steam locomotive was the proper equipment for a public railway. As a beginning, he persuaded the company to place one of his engines upon its construction trains. The experts who were employed to investigate the many proposed applications of power decided, however, that the most feasible equipment was a series of twenty-one stationary engines located at intervals along the right of way and hauling the cars stage after stage by means of a rope wound upon a drum-the principle of the cable railway which afterwards had its day in our streets. Still Stephenson would give the directors no peace. Finally, in order to settle the question of the practical utility of the traveling engine, the company offered a prize of five hundred pounds for the best locomotive engine, to be awarded after a competitive test upon certain conditions, the most notable of which were:

"2. The engine of six tons weight must be able to draw after it, day by day, twenty tons weight at ten miles an hour with a pressure of steam on the boiler not exceeding fifty pounds to the square inch."

"4. The engine and boiler must be supported on springs and rest on six wheels, the height of the whole not exceeding fifteen feet to the top of the chimney."

"7. The engine must be delivered complete and ready for trial at the Liverpool end of the railway not later than the 1st of October, 1829."

"8. The price of the engine must not exceed five hundred and fifty pounds."

George Stephenson and his son Robert threw all their resources into the production of the locomotive which was to carry their colors in the contest. The "Rocket" engine, which was built in their Newcastle shop, was fitted with a tubular boiler six feet long and three feet four inches in diameter. The fire-box was two feet wide and three feet high. On each side of the boiler at its rear end was an oblique cylinder, the piston-rods being connected with the outside of the two driving wheels, which were in front. The two rear wheels were about one-half the diameter of the drivers. The tender, also fourwheeled, was a simple affair, the water being carried in a large cask.

After a successful trial trip, the "Rocket," which weighed but four and a half tons, was sent by wagon across England to Carlisle, and thence to Liverpool. It was one of four steam engines entered in the competition which attracted wide attention. Among the entries was the "Novelty," the production of that talented Swede, John Ericsson, who afterwards, in America, built the iron-clad "Monitor." The "Novelty" showed fine bursts of speed, but failed in point of endurance. The "Perseverance" and "Sanspareil" developed radical defects, but the "Rocket," driven by George Stephenson's own hand was prepared for every turn of the competition, and surpassed all in power, speed, and general serviceability. To its makers the prize was unhesitatingly awarded, whereupon the hardy engineer amazed every beholder by letting out the last link and dashing past the grandstand at the rate of more than thirty miles an hour. The forced draft, which had made the Killingworth freight engines so successful, coupled with the tubular boiler, formed a combination which won the battle for the locomotive once for all, and made the name of George Stephenson a household word.

A year later, on the 15th of September, 1830, the Manchester and Liverpool Railway was formally opened. The Duke of Wellington-- the first citizen of the realm--was present with Sir Robert Peel and other distinguished personages, together with a vast throng of sightseers, enthusiastic spectators of the consummation of George Stephenson's dreams. Though marred by a fatal accident, the occasion proved the entire practicability of the railway as a means of transportation. The multitudes who rode in its cars on that memorable day were but a foretaste of the patronage which the line was to receive. Although the intention of its projectors was to limit its traffic chiefly to freight, the road from the first found its offices besieged by persons eager to ride. Thus passenger traffic became established as its leading source of revenue, and thus were the capitalists encouraged to prosecute the extension of the railway system to points where the outlook for freight business was much less than between Liverpool and Manchester. Though these roads were fiercely opposed by the landowners, the canal-men, and turnpike proprietors, they were pressed forward in every direction. Robert Stephenson shared with his father the responsibility of engineering some of the principal lines, though the two men had the grim satisfaction of seeing the experts who had ridiculed the initial project now eagerly bidding for the opportunity of conducting surveys for the new lines.

A mania for building railroads seized the world. The Stephensons were in demand not only throughout Great Britain, but even on the Continent. They had already made a market for their engines abroad, when, in 1835, they were summoned by the King of Belgium to assist in laying out a system of railways for that kingdom. For his services here the engineer was knighted by the King and banqueted at the royal table. Honored at home and abroad; happy in the general adoption of the ideas to which he had clung through opposition and adversity; proud of the son Robert, for whose education he had worked like a slave, and whom he now saw hailed as one of the great engineers of the world; fortunate in business; respected and beloved by men of every class, George Stephenson spent the closing years of his life in affluence and ease. He had earned his peace, for he had fought and won the battle of the locomotive, and so, by improving the means of communication, had advanced the interests of trade, and promoted the welfare of England and of mankind. George Stephenson died in 1848. His son Robert outlived him but eleven years, and was buried in Westminster Abbey as one of the great men of the century. The boldness of his engineering projects, the skill and daring with which he flung his railway bridges and viaducts across rivers, valleys, and straits, had caught and held the imagination of the world. Together the two men wrote the name of Stephenson large and lasting in the record of nineteenth-century England.

Had the nineteenth century nothing else to show save the improvement in transportation, its fame would be secure. Within a dozen years after the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, Great Britain was covered with railways or railway surveys, establishing all the trunk-lines which now exist. The thirty and a half miles of the original line grew by leaps and bounds to a system of nearly two thousand miles, the property of a single company, whose property is valued at five hundred million dollars. Twenty-five years after the day of the "Rocket's" victory eight thousand miles of railway were in operation in the United Kingdom. Another twenty-five years brought the total up to eighteen thousand miles, which had cost for construction nearly four billion dollars. At the same time (1883) the number of locomotives was 14,469, of cars, 490,661. Before Manchester and Liverpool were connected by railway thirty stage-coaches sufficed for the passenger traffic. The railway carried seven hundred thousand passengers between the two cities in its first year and one-half. Fifty years later the passengers on all the English lines numbered six hundred million, of whom eighty-five per cent traveled third-class. The freight traffic in the same year was two hundred and twenty-six million tons. Robert Stephenson lived to see one per cent of the entire population of the United Kingdom employed on the railways. In 1884 the number of such employees was 367,793. These few figures are sufficient to suggest the magnitude of the economic changes which took place in England, and indeed throughout the civilized world, as the direct result of the talent, industry, and perseverance of George Stephenson, the Northumbrian plowboy.

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW

1. Describe the early life of George Stephenson. 2. What attempts at locomotives had been made prior to his time? 3. What success of Stephenson's led to the Stockton-Darlington railway? 4. How did the " Quarterly" comment on the proposed Liverpool line? 5. What was the view of the Parliamentary committee? 6. Describe Stephenson's work on the Liverpool & Manchester line. 7. What competitors had the "Rocket"? 8. Describe the later work of the two Stephensons. 9. Contrast Stephenson's England with that of to-day.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LIFE OF STEPHENSON. Samuel Smiles. ("Lives of the Engineers.")

RUSSELL AND PARLIAMENTARY REFORM

The Parliament of England is one of the most ancient of political institutions. Constitutional historians find its germs in the council of the wise men--"The Witenagemot"--which was summoned to give advice to the early Anglo-Saxon kings. In the thirteenth century Simon de Montfort had added to the assembly of the nobles certain representatives of the counties, cities, and boroughs. The monarchs found this gathering of the estates of the nation a useful instrument of taxation and the Parliament in turn acquired certain legislative rights. In time the nobles or peers began to sit by themselves, leaving the chosen representatives to meet in a House of Commons. The story of the increasing influence of Parliament is in great part the history of the English nation. Before the close of the seventeenth century the power of Parliament had become the leading force in the state. Yet much remained to be done in the nineteenth century to bring this supreme governing body into living touch with the heart of the nation.

The conservative habit of the English had left the constitution of the House of Commons untouched for so many years that it had lost all but the semblance of a representative body. No uniform qualification for the voter existed. In one locality the franchise was closely restricted, in others every man, however poor, might exercise the right to vote. There were all manner of variations in these "fancy franchises," which had been conferred by special charters at long separated intervals. Neither was there any existing relation between population and representation. Strange as the statement will appear to American readers, accustomed to the reapportionment of congressional representation after every federal census, it is a fact that there had been no radical change in the boundaries of election districts in England for centuries. The population had meanwhile undergone enormous changes. Not only had it increased manifold, but the rise of modern industry had occasioned a redistribution of the people. London had become a swarming hive. Liverpool docks and warehouses were surrounded by a crowded city. Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, and other places scarcely known to the England of Tudor and Stuart, were centers of busy industrial life, attracting to themselves multitudes of the inhabitants of the countryside. The counties, large and small, continued to have equal representation in Parliament, though some of them were many times more populous than others. In the boroughs the inequalities were most flagrant. Where a goodly village had been in Tudor times there might now be nothing visible but the crumbling tower of the parish church, yet the place still retained its right to representation in the House of Commons. Such decayed or "rotten" boroughs existed in considerable numbers. Their few voters were controlled by the land-owning nobility. McCarthy says, "The case of Old Sarum is famous. It returned members to Parliament in the days of Edward III., and from that period down to the time of the Reform Bill. But the town of Old Sarum gradually disappeared. Owing to the rise of New Sarum (Salisbury) and to other causes the population gradually deserted it. The town became practically effaced from existence; its remains far less palpable or visible than those of any Baalbec or Palmyra. Yet it continued to be represented in Parliament. It was at one time bought by Lord Chatham's grandfather, Governor Pitt. It was coolly observed at the time that "Mr. Pitt's posterity now have an hereditary seat in the House of Commons as owners of Old Sarum," just as any earl had a seat in the House of Lords by virtue of his hereditary peerage. When the Reform Bill was passed the member of Parliament for the borough of Ludgershall was himself the only voter in the borough and had chosen himself to Parliament on his own nomination. Another place with two members had only seven qualified voters. McCarthy is quite within the truth when he asserts that two-thirds of the House of Commons was made up of the nominees of the peers and great landlords "who owned their boroughs and members just as they owned their parks and their cattle." Thus the power of the landed aristocracy, which was the House of Lords, lacked but little of being the House of Commons as well. The mass of the nation, which was now rapidly gaining in education and wealth, had no way of making its influence felt in Parliament except by the power of public opinion, to which the periodical and pamphlet press was beginning to give expression.

The condition of the representation, the rotten boroughs, as those in decay were called, and the pocket boroughs, a name applied to those which were the property of individuals, opened the way for shameless corruption. Where the electorate was small and the secret ballot unknown bribery had free rein. Seats were openly bought and sold. As early as 1770 the elder Pitt (Lord Chatham) had placed his finger upon this ailing spot in the English body politic, and had said, "Before the end of this century, either the Parliament will reform itself from within, or be reformed with a vengeance from without." His prediction was falsified by the reactionary effect of the French Revolution, which not only made the English aristocracy cautious about readjusting political arrangements, but kept the minds and hands of Englishmen so fully occupied with foreign affairs as to divert attention from their own domestic troubles. At the close of the long struggle with Napoleon the question came rapidly to the front. Financial distress and industrial depression made the populace restless and discontented. The glowing principles which had inspired the French Revolution in its early days with its watchwords of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," gained a deep lodgment in the popular mind. The dissatisfaction vented itself in attacks upon a political system which denied the right of representation to so large a proportion of the wealth-producing population.

The government at first turned a deaf ear to these appeals, then tried to suppress the agitation which swept through the great manufacturing towns. It was one of these bungling attempts to silence free speech in Manchester on August 16, 1819, which led to the trampling and sabring of many innocent persons by cavalrymen, the "Peterloo massacre," which the populace long cherished as a bloody score against, their aristocratic oppressors. For ten years more the democratic press continued to agitate even more bitterly for reform, and a lonely "radical" member of Parliament would bring forward his motions only to have them contemptuously thrust aside. In 1830, however, a ministry came into power which allowed nothing to stand in the way until the long awaited bill had become a law. The condition which contributed to its success, the incidents of the tremendous parliamentary struggle, and the men who carried it through, are all worthy of the most careful attention of the student of human affairs.

The death of George IV. (June 26, 1830) made way for his brother, William IV., and made necessary a general parliamentary election. The summer had seen a liberal revolution in Paris. The Bourbons had been thrust out and Louis Philippe had been accepted as the citizen-king of the French, governing under a liberal constitution. This revolution, and simultaneous movements throughout western Europe, touched an answering chord in the breasts of Englishmen, and the Tories found themselves in a minority when the new Parliament assembled in November. The Duke of Wellington was Prime Minister, the last man from whom the popular cause could expect to receive any concessions. At the opening of the session the premier took occasion to declare his disbelief "that the state of representation could be improved or be rendered more satisfactory to the country at large than at the present moment." "I am fully convinced," he said, "that the country possesses a legislature which answers all the good purposes of legislation, and this to a greater degree than any legislature has answered in any other country whatever." He flatly declared his determined opposition to any measure of reform. Within a fortnight his government met its Waterloo and he resigned.

Earl Gray, the Whig premier who succeeded Wellington, came into office fully resolved to pass a Reform Bill. The responsibility of drafting the measure was intrusted to a young Whig commoner, Lord John Russell, a younger son of the Duke of Bedford, and a scion of one of the great Whig houses. Lord John Russell had entered Parliament in 1813, at the age of twenty-one, for one of the family boroughs. He was now in his thirty-seventh year, and his parliamentary career, if not brilliant for oratory, had at least been marked by intelligent devotion to high ideals. In 1819, before the echoes of Peterloo had died away, he had asked Parliament to disfranchise all boroughs of proved corruption, and transfer their representation to more deserving constituencies. A little later he proved to the House the corruption existing at Gram-pound, and secured the disfranchisement of that borough and the transfer of its voting rights to the great county of York. This was but a small step, but it opened the way to tremendous changes. He was determined, he said, to strip "the dead bones of a former state of England" of their political influence and give it to the "living energy of England of the nineteenth century, with its steam engines and its factories, its cotton and woolen cloths, its cutlery and its coal mines, its wealth and its intelligence." Session after session he returned to this text only to be as often defeated by the Tories. He was more successful in 1828 when he carried the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, relics of a bygone age when it was thought necessary to the safety of the nation to exclude from military or civil office all persons who did not take the communion in accordance with the ritual of the Established Church. "Lord John," as he came to be called in the course of his half-century of parliamentary life, would have advanced from the relief of Protestant dissenters to the emancipation of the Catholics, had not the Tories, in their dread of civil war in Ireland, forestalled him, and made the measure their own (April, 1829).

The first Reform Bill, which had been drafted by Russell, and worked over by Lord Durham and other ministers, was presented to the Commons on March 1, 1831. Its provisions had been kept profoundly secret, and the house was thronged to hear them explained in the low and measured tones of Lord John Russell. The nation was as eager as the immediate auditory to know how far the government would go in granting the popular demand. Touching upon some of the existing anomalies the speaker imagined a foreigner visiting England; having been impressed with British wealth, civilization, and renown, "Would not such a foreigner," he queried, "be much astonished if he were taken to a green mound and informed that it sent two members to the British Parliament? . . . . or if he walked into a park without the vestige of a dwelling and was told that it, too, sent two members to the British Parliament? But if he was surprised at this, how much more would he be astonished if he were carried into the north of England, where he would see large, flourishing towns, full of trade, activity, and intelligence, vast magazines of wealth and manufactures, and were told that these places sent no representatives to Parliament!"