corporated
with the larger companies, such as the London and North west, the Great
Western, etcetera.

All the lines carried in one year (1870) somewhere about 307 millions of
passengers--in other words, that number of passenger journeys were
performed on them. The mail and stage-coaches in their best days only
conveyed, as we have said, two millions! See note at end of chapter.

It is almost overwhelming to consider what a vast change in the
condition and habits of the people of this country is implied in these
figures. Forty years ago none travelled but the comparatively rich, and
that only to an extent equal to about two-thirds of the present
population of London. Now-a-days the poorest artisan can, and does,
afford to travel, and the number of journeys performed each year on all
our British railways is equal to more than the entire population of
Europe! which, in Stewart's "Modern Geography," is set down at 285
millions. From this of course it follows, that as many thousands of
men, women, and children never travel at all, many others must have
undertaken numerous journeys in that year.

The facilities afforded by railways are altogether innumerable. If so
disposed you may sup one night in the south of England and the next
night in the north of Scotland. Thousands of families dwell in the
country, while the heads thereof go to their business in town by rail
every morning and return home every evening. Huntsmen, booted and
spurred, are whirled off, horses and all, to distant fields, whence,
after "crossing country" all day, they return to the railway and are
whirled back to town in time for dinner. Navvys and artisans are
conveyed to their work at a penny a mile, and monster-trains carry
thousands of excursionists to scenes of rural delight that our fathers
never dreamed of in their wildest flights of fancy.

One of the most remarkable and interesting facts in connexion with all
this is, that although mail-coaches have been beaten off the field,
there are actually more horses employed in this country now than there
were in 1837, while canals are doing more business than they ever did,
and are making higher profits too. In 1865 the carriage of cattle by
railway amounted to between fourteen or fifteen million head of all
kinds. The consumption of coal, in the same year, by our railways
amounted to four million tons, and the quantity of that and other
minerals carried by rail continually is enormous.

T