The life of George Stephenson, railway engineer - Lighthouse ...

306 LIFE OF GEORGE STEPHENSON, [chap. xxvi.
was formed, to bring Maidstone into more direct communication
with the metropolis. In like manner the London and Bristol
(afterwards the Great Western) Railway was vehemently op-
posed by the people of the towns through which the line was
projected to pass ; and when the bill was thrown out by the
Lords,—after 30,000Z. had been expended by the promoters,
the inhabitants of Eton assembled, under the presidency of the
Marquis of Chandos, to rejoice and congratulate themselves
and the country on the defeat of the measure.
When Colonel Sibthorpe openly declared his hatred of " those
infernal railroads," he only expressed in a strong manner the
feeling which then pervaded the country gentry and many of the
middle classes in the southern districts. That respectable noble-
man, the late Earl of Harewood, when it was urged by the
gentlemen who waited upon him on behalf of the Liverpool and
Manchester company, that great advantages to trade and com-
merce were to be anticipated from the facilities which would be
afforded by railways, refused to admit the force of the argument,
as he doubted whether any new impetus to manufactures would be
advantageous to the country. And Mr. H. Berkeley, the intel-
ligent member for Cheltenham, in like manner, strongly expressed
the views of his class, when, at a public meeting held in that town,
he declared his utter detestation of railways, and wished that the
concoctors of every such scheme, with their solicitors and engi-
neers, were at rest in Paradise ! " Nothing," said he, " is more
distasteful to me than to hear the echo of our hills reverberating
with the noise of hissing railroad engines running through the
heart of our hunting country, and destroying that noble sport to
which I have been accustomed from my childhood." Colonel
Sibthorpe even went so far as to declare that he " would rather
meet a highwayman, or see a burglar on his premises, than an
engineer; he should be much more safe, and of the two classes
he thought the former more respectable! "
Railways had thus, like most other great social improvements,
to force their way against the fierce antagonism of united igno-
rance and prejudice. Public-spirited obstructives were ready to
choke the invention at its birth, on the ground of the general
good. The forcible invasion of property—the intrusion of public
—