82 ENGLISH SAGA

rail to Carlisle, by stage coach over Shap Fell to Preston, and
thence by what was soon to become the North-Western Railway
to Birmingham. In this fashion1 a man could travel from Euston
to Glasgow in twentyrfour hours—by rail to Fleetwood, by
steamer to Ardrossan and by rail on to Glasgow. "What more
can any reasonable man want?" asked the Railway Times. Yet
the reasonable man and the railroad speculators who catered for
his needs wanted more.

Of the latter the most famous was George Hudson, the York
linen-draper. Under his dynamic and sanguine leadership a
railway mania developed that rivalled the South Sea Bubble.1
During the period of cheap money after 1843 nearly ten thousand
miles of new railway were sanctioned by private parliamentary
acts. Much speculative money was lost in the process—the
sudden slump of 1847 was a minor social calamity—but amalga-
mation of the smaller and more hare-brained ventures by the
larger resulted in ultimate stabilisation. By 1849 the railway
system of England had taken on the general form we know
to-day.

All this involved a revolution in English life and organisation.
For many years the country was covered by armies of "navi-
gators" or "navvies," whom contractors employed to translate
the grandiose dreams of the railway projectors and the capital
of their shareholders into solid cutting, embankment, tunnel
and permanent way. In 1848 nearly 200,000 labourers, many of
them Irish, were engaged in this vast task. With their rough
habits and speech, high wages—pay day was usually a brutal
debauch—and their generous taste in steak, plush waistcoats and
whisky,2 they uprooted ancient ways of living in every place
where they encamped. To many of the older skilled workers in
the country districts their square-tailed coats of velveteen, their
soiled white felt hats and spotted scarlet vests symbolised the
"accursed wages of savagery and sin": • for the younger villagers
their sojourn had an exciting, unsettling quality that in after
years caused many to follow them to the great cities along
the gleaming lines they had laid.

In 1840 England was still regional in its outlook; by 1850
it was national. Save in the remoter shires where there was

1Punch depicted a crowd of citizens throwing themselves and their money-bags in
front of an iron "puffing billy" while parliamentary lawyers in the shape of crocodiles
waited hungrily in the foreground and gulls hovered overhead. JPvnch IX, (

•They c&5fit« white beSr.». X