se tram-lines very naturally had exactly the width of an ordinary
cart, a width prescribed by the strength of one horse. Few people saw in
the locomotive anything but a cheap substitute for horseflesh, or found
anything incongruous in letting the dimensions of a horse determine the
dimensions of an engine. It mattered nothing that from the first the
passenger was ridiculously cramped, hampered, and crowded in the
carriage. He had always been cramped in a coach, and it would have
seemed "Utopian"--a very dreadful thing indeed to our grandparents--to
propose travel without cramping. By mere inertia the horse-cart gauge,
the 4 ft. 81/2 in. gauge, _nemine contradicente_, established itself in
the world, and now everywhere the train is dwarfed to a scale that
limits alike its comfort, power, and speed. Before every engine, as it
were, trots the ghost of a superseded horse, refuses most resolutely to
trot faster than fifty miles an hour, and shies and threatens
catastrophe at every point and curve. That fifty miles an hour, most
authorities are agreed, is the limit of our speed for land travel, so
far as existing conditions go.[5] Only a revolutionary reconstruction of
the railways or the development of some new competing method of land
travel can carry us beyond that.

People of to-day take the railways for granted as they take sea and sky;
they were born in a railway world, and they expect to die in one. But if
only they will strip from their eyes the most blinding of all
influences, acquiescence in the familiar, they will see clearly enough
that this vast and elaborate railway system of ours, by which the whole
world is linked together, is really only a vast system of trains of
horse-waggons and coaches drawn along rails by pumping-engines upon
wheels. Is that, in spite of its present vast extension, likely to
remain the predominant method of land locomotion--even for so short a
period as the next hundred years?

Now, so much capital is represented by the existing type of railways,
and they have so firm an establishment in the acquiescence of men, that
it is very doubtful if the railways will ever attempt any very
fundamental change in the direction of greater speed or facility, unless
they are first exposed to the pressure of our second alternative,
competition, and we may very well go on to inquire how long will it be
before that second alternative comes into operation--if ever it is to do
so.

Let us consider what ot