of roads, which would, no doubt, have led
in time to their extension into a general system.
That general system, however, Gray, and Gray
alone, had at this period at once foreseen and
comprehended with all its stupendous
advantages to mankind. The goodness of the idea
had fully possessed and absorbed him, and
caused him to abandon all other pursuits for a
considerable time, in order to lay this system
with all its details and all his calculations for
its carrying out, before the "public" in his
volume. This he did in an extraordinary
manner; he calculated the cost of making such
roads, and his figures are remarkably accurate, for
calculations preceding almost all necessary
practical data. He invented turn-tables, and tables
or frames for shifting carriages from one line to
another, very much as they now exist, for his
drawings of them in his volume enabled others
to appropriate and patent them. That the idea
of a general system of iron roads and steam
trains was as yet perfectly new to the public,
is proved by the storm of ridicule and abuse
which fell upon Gray, both from the press and
the public. He was a wild enthusiast, a
madman who ought to be shut up, and to whom
no one could listen. As Mr. Smiles states, he
not only issued edition after edition of his work,
but he memorialised parliament, ministers, the
Lord Mayor of London, and other persons and
parties—and was treated as a lunatic, in the
words of the Quarterly Review, " not worthy of
notice."

And yet thousands and tens of thousands
must have read his work, for in five years it
went through as many editions, and we have now
lying before us his fifth edition, dated 1825, and
prepared with copious notes and additions in
MS., for a sixth. By this time, however, his
idea had familiarised itself to the public mind,
Pease and Stephenson at Darlington had worked
out practically a fragment of Gray's grand plan,
the very recommendation of this Thomas Gray,
as Mr. Smiles admits (see Life of George
Stephenson, page 170): " Mr. Gray suggested
the propriety of making a railway between
Manchester and Liverpool." This had been
successfully adopted and accomplished, and the
public was satisfied of the practicability of the
whole scheme. Gray was no longer a madman,
but he was instantly forgotten. All the
engineers who must have read and digested his
five editions, with all his plans of cutting tunnels,
building bridges, and his maps of a general line
for England and Ireland, rushed forward to reap
the fruits of the grand plan which they had so
unmercifully denounced as insanity. Gray, as
Mr. Smiles justly observes, had the disadvantage
of being neither engineer nor mechanic, and,
therefore, he gained nothing but scorn and
odium for having elaborately laid down and
shown the practicability and impending enormous
consequences of the system now fully
admitted and accepted. He petitioned for
employment on the very line executed from his
recommendation, and was refused. He lived to
endure a still greater mortification; he lived to
see a sum of twenty thousand pounds subscribed
for Mr. George Hudson because he had proved
a daring and successful speculator in this system,
while the originator himself was left to poverty.
In such poverty Gray died at an early age: his
end, no doubt, hastened by mortification.

Mr. Smiles, with the common bias of a man
who has a hero to deify, robs Thomas Gray of his
due merits, to adorn his protégé George Stephenson
with them, who did not need such adornments,
having substantive merits of his own.
He says Gray drew his idea of an iron road with
locomotives working on it from Blenkinsop's
colliery line and locomotives at Middleton near
Leeds, established in 1812. Thomas Gray not
only avows this, but says that from this nucleus
he saw and worked out his own system. But had
not George Stephenson also Blenkinsop's
locomotive in his eye when he went on to endeavour
to improve locomotives? Undoubtedly.
Blenkinsop's locomotives and the Middleton colliery
line were well known to all engineers. And the
simple fact is, that George Stephenson was not
the inventor, but only the improver of locomotives.
Stephenson was a man of strong and
persevering faculties, and of extremely slow
ideas. He went on slowly but steadily,
developing as an engine-maker and engineer, but
rather in the latter character from the suggestions
of others than from his own ideas. For
the conception of a great plan like that
conceived by Gray, of a national system of railways,
his mind was not constituted. This we find
amply demonstrated by Mr. Smiles himself in
his life of Stephenson.

"In 1822, when Stephenson had made the
Stockton and Darlington line of railway, Blen-
Blenkinsop's locomotive line had been at work ten
years; it began running on the 12th of August,
1812, and continued for many years one of
the many curiosities of the neighbourhood."
Smiles's Life of Stephenson, p. 72. " In his
first locomotive, constructed at Killingworth, Mr.
Stephenson to some extent followed Blenkinsop's
engine," p. 84. Mr. Stephenson's own
locomotives had been running at Killingworth
eight years, being started on the 25th of July,
1814, p. 85. Yet during all this time, so far
from Stephenson having acquired an idea of a
general system of railways like Gray, he had
not even awoke to the conception of a railway
car being of further use then to carry heavy
goods. We have Mr. Smiles's conclusive statement
of this very extraordinary fact. " At first,
passengers were not thought of; and it was
only while the works were in progress that the
starting of a passenger coach was seriously
considered. An old stage-coach, called the
' Queen Charlotte,' was purchased and mounted
on a wooden frame." Mr. Stephenson, so far
from even suggesting this step himself, only
thought the experiment " worthy of a trial."
Yet Gray had amply demonstrated, for five
years, and through five editions of his book, and
in memorials to public authorities, and in
magazine articles, that not only would railroads
become a medium for passenger traffic, but that