This relative debility is, at the same time, more apparent to the
stockholders than to their customers. The superstructure and "plant"
of the Erie has lately stood interested inspection from abroad with
great credit, and that of the Great Western is unexceptionable. The
vote of travelers may be safely allotted to the broad gauge. They
have more elbow room. The carriages attain the requisite width without
unpleasantly, not to say dangerously, overhanging the centre of
gravity; and, other things equal, the movement is steadier. Nor is the
financial aspect of the question apt to impress gloomily the tourist
as he enters the Paddington station and looks around at its blaze of
polychrome and richness of decoration generally. As the coach doors
are slammed upon you, the guard steps into his "van," the vast
drivers, taller than your head plus the regulation stove-pipe, slowly
begin their whirl, and you roll majestically forth through a long
file of liveried servants of the company, drawn up or in action on the
platform, the sensation of patronizing a poverty-stricken corporation
is by no means likely to harass you. You cease to realize that the
Napoleon of engineers, Monsieur Brunel, made a disastrous mistake in
the design of this splendid highway, and that, as some will have it,
it was his Moscow. His error, if one there was, existed only in the
selection of the width of track. Whatever the demerits of the design
in that one particular, the execution is in all above praise. The road
was his pet. Once finished, it was his delight, as with the breeder of
a fine horse, to mount it and try its mettle. Over and again would
he occupy the footboard between London and Bristol, and rejoice as a
strong man in running his race at close to seventy miles an hour. He
and Stephenson were capital types of the Gaul and Briton, striving
side by side on the same field, as it will be good for the world that
they should ever do.