took the lead in establishing transatlantic steamers; but Liverpool,
backed by Manchester, transplanted to her own waters the new trade, and even
the steamers that proved the problem.

Railways (the only great idea in this generation that Liverpool has ventured
to originate and execute) have not, as was promised, transferred any part of
the Liverpool trade to Manchester; but, on the contrary, largely increased
and strengthened their connection with the cotton metropolis. An hour now
takes the cotton broker to his manufacturing customers twice a week, who
formerly rose at five o'clock in the morning to travel by coach in four hours
to Manchester, and returned wearied at midnight.

The Electric Telegraph, the next great invention of this commercial age was
not less beneficial to this port by facilitating the rapid interchange of
communication with the manufacturing districts, and settling the work of days
in a few hours. A hundred miles apart merchants can now converse, question,
propose, and bargain.

By all these improvements uncertainties have been reduced to certainties, and
capital has been more than doubled in value. On the expected day, well
calculated beforehand, the steamer arrives from America; with the rapidity of
lightning the news she brings is transmitted to Manchester, to Birmingham, to
Sheffield, to London, to Glasgow; a return message charters a ship, and a
single day is enough to bring down the manufactured freight. Thus news can
be received and transmitted, a cargo of raw material landed, manufactured
goods brought down by rail from the interior of England, and put on board a
vessel and despatched, in less time than it occupied a few years ago to send
a letter to Manchester and get an answer.

And under all these changes, while commerce grows and grows, the porters and
the brokers, the warehousemen and the merchants, are able to take toll on the
consumption of England.

Even the old dangerous roadstead, and far-falling tides of the Mersey, proved
an advantage to Liverpool; by driving the inhabitants to commence the
construction of Docks before any other port in the kingdom, and thus obtain a
certain name and position in the mercantile world, from having set an example
which cities provided with more safe and convenient natural harbours were
unwilling to follow.

The first Dock ever constructed in England is now the site of the Liverpool
Custom House; a large building erected at a period when ou