a century of improvement on pumping engines, there remained nothing but the very obvious step of getting the engine that had been developed on wheels and out upon the ways of the world.
Ever and again during the eighteenth century an engine would be put upon the roads and pronounced a failure—one monstrous Palæoferric creature was visible on a French high road as early as 1769—but by the dawn of the nineteenth century the problem had very nearly got itself solved. By 1804 Trevithick had a steam locomotive indisputably in motion and almost financially possible; and from his hands it puffed its way, slowly at first and then, under Stephenson, faster and faster, to a transitory empire over the earth. It was a steam locomotive—but for all that it was primarily a steam engine for pumping adapted to a new end; it was a steam engine whose ancestral stage had developed under conditions that were by no means exacting in the matter of weight. And from that fact followed a consequence that has hampered railway travel and transport very greatly, and that is tolerated nowadays only through a belief in its practical necessity. The steam locomotive was all too huge and heavy for the high road—it had to be put upon rails. And so clearly linked are steam engines and railways in our minds that, in common language now, the latter implies the former. But indeed it is the result of accidental impediments, of avoidable difficulties that we travel to-day on rails.
Railway travelling is at best a compromise. The quite conceivable ideal of locomotive convenience is
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