In this year of 1851, to describe the Liverpool and Manchester Railway would
be absurd; acres of print, in all civilized languages, and yards of picture-
illustration, have been devoted to it. At Newton Station you see below you a
race-course of great antiquity, and what was once a huge hotel, built to
supply a room large enough for the Mother Partingtons of Lancashire to meet
and prepare their mops for sweeping back the Atlantic tide of public opinion.
There they met, and dined and drank and shouted, and unanimously agreed that
it was foolish legislation which transferred the right of representation from
the village of Newton to the great city of Manchester; after which they went
home, and wisely submitted to the summons which found its speaking-trumpets
at Manchester. Fortunately for this country, a minority knows how to submit
to a majority, and the Conservative Hall, by a sort of accidental satire on
its original uses, has been turned into a printing office.
A little farther on is Chat-Moss, a quaking bog, which the opponents of the
first railway proved, to the satisfaction of many intelligent persons, to be
an impassable obstacle to the construction of any solid road.
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