AMONGST the curiosities of human reasoning is this: one forms a judgment on certain statements; they turn out incorrect, yet the judgment sound.
This occurs oftenest when, to divine what any known person will do in a case stated, we go boldly by his character, his habits, or his interest: for these are great forces, towards which men gravitate through various and even contrary circumstances.
Now women, sitting at home out of detail’s way, are somewhat forced, as well as naturally inclined, to rely on their insight into character; and, by this broad clue, often pass through false or discoloured data to a sound calculation.
Thus it was Mrs. Dodd applied her native sagacity to divine why Richard Hardie declined Julia for his son’s wife, and how to make him withdraw that dissent: and the fair diviner was much mistaken in detail but right in her conclusion; for Richard Hardie was at that moment the unlikeliest man in Barkington to decline Julia Dodd — with Hard Cash in five figures — for his daughter-inlaw.
I am now about to make a revelation to the reader, that will incidentally lead him to Mrs. Dodd’s conclusion, but by a different path.
The outline she gave her daughter and my reader of Richard Hardie’s cold and prudent youth was substantially correct; but something had occurred since then, unknown to her, unknown to all Barkington. The centuries had blown a respectable bubble.
About two hundred and fifty years ago, some genius, as unknown as the inventor of the lathe, laid the first wooden tramroad, to enable a horse to draw forty-two cwt. instead of seventeen. The coalowners soon used it largely. In 1738, iron rails were invented; but prejudice, stronger than that metal, kept them down, and the wooden ones in vogue, for some thirty years. Then iron prevailed.
Meantime, a much greater invention had been creeping up to join the metal way; I mean the locomotive power of steam, whose history is not needed here. Enough that in 1804 took place as promising a wedding as civilisation ever saw; for then an engine built by Trevethick, a great genius frittered for want of pluck, drew carriages, laden with ten tons, five miles an hour on a Welsh railway. Next stout Stephenson came on the scene, and insisted on benefiting mankind in spite of themselves, and of shallow legislators, a priori reasoners, and a heavy Review whose political motto was, “Stemus super antiquas vias;” which may be rendered, “Better stand still on turnpikes than move on rails.”
His torments and triumph are history.
Two of his repartees seem neat: 1. To Lord Noodle, or Lord Doodle, which was it? objecting haughtily, “And suppose a cow should get in the way of your engine, sir?” he replied, “Why, then it would be bad — for the coow.” The objector had overrated the obstructive power of his honoured parent.
2. To the a priori reasoners, who sat in their studies and demonstrated with complete unanimity that uncogged wheels would revolve on a smooth rail, but leave the carriage in statu quo, he replied by building an engine with Lord Ravensworth’s noble aid, hooking on eight carriages, and rattling off up an incline. “Solvitur ambulando,” quoth Stephenson the stout-hearted to Messrs. A Priori.
Next a coach ran on the Stockton and Darlington rail. Next the Liverpool and Manchester line was projected. Oh, then, what bitter opposition to the national benefactors, and the good of man!
Awake from the tomb echoes of dead Cant.
“The revolving wheels might move the engine on a rail; but what would that avail if they could not move them in the closet, and on a mathematical paper? Railways would be bad for canals, bad for morals, bad for highwaymen, bad for roadside inns: the smoke would kill the partridges (‘Aha! thou hast touched us nearly,’ said the country gentlemen), the travellers would go slowly to their destination, but swift to destruction.” And the Heavy Review, whose motto was “Stemus super turnpikes,” offered “to back old Father Thames against the Woolwich railway for any sum. And Black Will, who drove the next heaviest ephemeral in the island, told a schoolboy, who now writes these pages, “there’s nothing can ever be safe at twenty miles an hour, without ’tis a bird in the air;” and confirmed it with an oath. Briefly, buzz! buzz! buzz!
Gray was crushed, Trevethick driven out of the country, stout Steevie thwarted, badgered, taunted, and even insulted, and bespattered with dirt — I might say with dung, since his opponents discharged their own brains at him by speech and writing. At last, when, after the manner of men, they had manured their benefactor well, they consented to reap him. Railways prevailed, and increased, till lo and behold a Prime Minister with a spade delving one in the valley of the Trent. The tide turned; good working railways from city to city became an approved investment of genuine capital, notwithstanding the frightful frauds and extortion to which the projectors were exposed in a Parliament which, under a new temptation, showed itself as corrupt and greedy as any nation or age can parallel.
When this sober state of things had endured some time, there came a year that money was loose, and a speculative fever due in the whirligig of time. Then railways bubbled. New ones were advertised, fifty a month, and all went to a premium. High and low scrambled for the shares, even when the projected line was to run from the town of Nought to the village of Nothing across a goose common. The flame spread, fanned by prospectus and advertisement, two mines of glowing fiction, compared with which the legitimate article is a mere tissue of understatements; princes sat in railway tenders, and clove the air like the birds whose effigies surmount their armorials; our stiffest Peers relaxed into Boards; Bishops warned their clergy against avarice, and buttered Hudson an inch thick for shares; and turned their little aprons into great pockets; men, stainless hitherto, put down their infants, nurses included, as independent subscribers, and bagged the coupons, capturi tartaros. Nearly everything that had a name, and, by some immense fortuity, could write it, demanded its part in the new and fathomless source of wealth: a charwoman’s two sons were living in a garret on fifteen shillings apiece per week; down went their excellencies’ names for L. 37,000 worth of bubbling iron; another shareholder applied imperiously from a house in Grosvenor Square; he had breakfasted on the steps. Once more in Time’s whirligig gentlemen and their footmen jostled one another on the Exchange, and a motley crew of peers and printers, vicars and admirals, professors, cooks, costermongers, cotton-spinners, waiters, coachmen, priests, potboys, hankers, braziers, dairymen, mail-guards, barristers, spinsters, butchers, beggars, duchesses, rag-merchants — in one word, of Nobs and Snobs; fought and scrambled pell mell for the popular paper, and all to get rich in a day.8
8 For the humours of the time see the parliamentary return of Railway Subscribers, published 1846: Francis’s British Railway: Evan’s Commercial Crisis; and the pamphlets and journals of the day.
Richard Hardie had some money in existing railways, but he declined to invest his hard cash upon hypotheticals. He was repeatedly solicited to be a director, but always declined. Once he was offered a canny bribe of a thousand pounds to let his name go on a provisional committee. He refused with a characteristic remark: “I never buy any merchandise at a fancy price, not even hard cash.”
Antidote to the universal mania, Barkington had this one wet blanket; an unpopular institution; but far more salutary than a damp sheet especially in time of Bubble.
Nearly all his customers consulted Richard Hardie, and this was the substance of his replies: “The Bubbles of History, including the great one of my youth, were national, as well as individual, follies. It is not so now: the railways, that ruin their allottees and directors, will be pure additions to the national property, and some day remove one barrier more from commerce. The Dutch tulip frenzy went on a petty fancy: the Railway fury goes on a great fact. Our predecessors blew mere soap bubbles; we blow an iron bubble: but here the distinction ends. In 1825 the country undertook immediate engagements, to fulfil which a century’s income would not have sufficed: today a thousand railway companies are registered, requiring a capital of six hundred million and another thousand projected, to cost another five hundred million. Where is the money to come from? If the world was both cultivated and civilised (instead of neither), and this nation could be sold, with every building, ship, quadruped, jewel, and marketable female in it, it would not fetch the money to make these railways; yet the country undertakes to create them in three years with its floating capital. Arithmetic of Bedlam! The thing cannot last a year without collapsing.” Richard Hardie talked like this from first to last. But, when he saw that shares invariably mounted; that even those who, for want of interest, had to buy them at a premium, sold them at a profit; when he saw paupers making large fortunes in a few months, by buying into every venture and selling the next week — he itched for his share of the booty, and determined to profit in ............