by a sacrifice. Three years later there was but this one
railway in England, and one, seven miles long, in Scotland. But in
1837 the Liverpool and Birmingham line was opened; in 1838 the London
and Birmingham and the Liverpool and Preston lines, and an Act was
passed for transmitting the mails by rail; in 1839 there was the
opening of the London and Croydon line. The ball was set fairly
rolling, and the supersession of ancient modes of communication was a
question of time merely. The advance of the new system was much
accelerated at the outset by the fact that railway enterprise became
the favourite field for speculation, men being attracted by the
novelty and tempted by exaggerated prospects of profit; and the mania
was followed, like other manias, with results largely disastrous to
the speculators and to commerce. But through years of good fortune
and of bad fortune the iron network has continued to spread itself,
until all the land lies embraced in its ramifications; and it is
spreading still, like some strange organism the one condition of
whose life is reproduction, knitting the greatest centres of commerce
with the loneliest and remotest villages that were wont to lie far
out of the travelled ways of men, and bringing _Ultima Thule_ into
touch with London.

[Illustration: George Stephenson]

Meanwhile the steam service by sea has advanced almost with that by
land. In 1838 three steamships crossed the Atlantic between this
country and New York, the _Great Western_, sailing from Bristol, and
_Sirius_, from Cork, distinguished themselves by the short passages
they made,--of fifteen days in the first case, and seventeen days in
the second,--and by their using steam power _alone_ to effect the
transit, an experiment that had not been risked before. It was now
proved feasible, and in a year or two there was set on foot that
regular steam communication between the New World and the Old, which
ever since has continued to draw them into always closer connection,
as the steamers, like swift-darting shuttles, weave their multiplying
magic lines across the liquid plain between.

The telegraph wires that run beside road and rail, doing the office
of nerves in transmitting intelligence with thrilling quickness from
the extremities to the head and from the head to the extremities of
our State, are now so familiar an object, and their operations, such
mere matters of every day, that we do not often recall how utterly
unfamil