The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1875-10-02 00:00:00

factoring districts know too well how many a born
genius, even with the best opportunities, has been ship-
wrecked on some folly or other. All know how easily
a man of talent, education, and friends may be a
trifler, and pass away leaving no mark behind him.
George Stephenson has left his mark on the world.
That mark is a network of tens of thousands of iron
ways, rendering the whole surface of the globe as aear
and neighbourly by the best measure of distance—that
is, time—as a small State or an ordinary capital.
He has comprised us all within a family circle, and
it is our fault if we indulge in family jars. Where.
ever, we go and look on the earth itself, there we
see the monument of our common benefactor. The
whole line, for all are, in fact, one now, is his grave,
and his best memorial. But if we ask for the old home,
the small beginning, the ancestral stock from which all i
these world-wide branches spread, it is the humble
little line from Darlington to Stockton opened this day
fifty years ago. The growth of an oak from an acorn,
or the transformation of a continent by the introduc-
tion of the plough, will hardly strike the imagination
so much as the vastness and rapidity of the growth
before us, young as it must still be to many eyes.
Even to confine ourselves to -these isles, though only
a small part of the immense whole, the figures
we publish to-day inform us that nine or ten
miles opened this day fifty years have grown to
16,f)00 the 800 received for passengers in the first
twenty-one months have grown to £22,000,000 in one
year. Even figures, however, do but feebly indicate
the change wrought in the whole constitution of society
by the iron horse and iron road. They may have their
drawbacks in common with every other invention of
man or blessing more directly received from the skies.
Had we "the wings of a dove," we should not always
make the beat use of them. But when, in prophetic
language, the valley is exalted and the mountain
made low, the crooked made straight and the rougn
places plain, in order that we may see and enjoy all
that Heaven has in store for us, it is our own fault if we
do not make the use that is intended.

The Times of Tuesday, in a leader, also writes :
The result of the slender work of 1825 has been in-
deed of transcendant importance. The twelve miles
or so of line between Stockton and Darlington have
been already, as our statistics of yesterday showed,
multiplied more than a thousandfold within the limits
of the United Kingdom. The expenditure, though
this we must admit is a less favourable symptom, has
been even more than correspondingly increased. Our
railway system has grown with the growth of the na-
tional wealth, and has had a principal share in foster-
ing it. An enormous solid interest has come into
being within the memory of living men, greater
and more powerful than many of the kingdoms
which fill a large space in the annals of history. The
course of things has been so rapid and the result so
astonishing that scarcely any comparison could be too
magnificent to be employed as illustrating the literal
truth. The growth of the grain of mustard seed, the
development of the acorn into the oak, or rather into an
entire forest of oaks, express the difference between
the beginning and the end even as far, as it has yet
come. To express the rapidity of the process we may
borrow the terms of another art of somewhat later
origin, and compare it with the flash of the electric
spark along the wire—the result produced almost
before we have realised the process with distinctness.
... The fact is beyond dispute that'the means of
transport, and with it the material wealth of the coun-
try, have increased far beyond the utmost hcpes of
those who hoped most from the experiment of fifty
years ago. But has all this been accompanied by a cor-
responding improvement in other directions, in which
improvement was even more needed? We have done
much, it is true, for education, but we are still too
far behind others to be content with our own pro-
gress. . . . Much as we have done in one direction, as
much more remains to be done in another before
we can be satisfied with our as yet imperfect pro-
gress. It was the wisdom of the Romans to place by
the side of their victorious Consuls, in the full flush
of their triumphs, an attendant who should remind
them that they were mortal. It was an ungrateful
office, perhaps, but it was most certainly a very useful
one; and it is scarcely less right in our own case to
keep in mind our faults and shortcomings when we
are rejoicing, as a nation, over the splendid achieve-
ments which our Railway Jubilee has set prominently
before our eyes.
We would not be thought to wish to underrate or to
depreciate the importance of the great work whichwas
celebrated yesterday at Darlington. Its humble be-
ginning, its rapid growth, the enormous proportions it
has attained already, and the indirect results it has
brought with it stand out so visibly before us, and force
themselves upon the imagination so powerfully, that
the real difficulty is to refrain from too exultant a tone
in speaking of them. But just as our railway system
is part of the machinery of our whole industrial de-
velopment, so that, too, is a part, and a part only, of
what makes life valuable to us, and is worth less for
itself than for the further uses which may be made of
it. We learn from the example of George Stephenson
the moral not less than the material conditions of
success. It is not as a great inventor or a great
machinist alone that his name comes prominently
before us, but even more as one who possessed above
his fellows the true English qualities of determination
and endurance and hopefulness in the teeth of difficulty,
who could console himself under present slights and
troubles with the certain prospect of a success which
he could scarcely have hoped to live to realize, and
could breathe his own faith and courage into those
with whom he was associated in his work. The name
of Pease, too, worthily commemorated with that of
Stephenson as a founder of our present railway
system, calls up at the same time the memory of
achievements of another order, to which Pease himself
would have attached a primary importance. The con-
nexion of the name of Pease with education and with
sanitary reform may serve usefully to remind us of
points on which we ourselves have not always been
equally zealous; and we must take his example in its
totality when it comes before us in its better known
relation to the subject of yesterday's jubilee. It is
curious to observe how, in the matter of railways, as
of other great modern discoveries, the thing itself was
long known and used before it was turned to account
for its present purpose, and in the form it has ulti-
mately assumed. Gunpowder, the mariner's compass,
the art of printing, may all be quoted in illustration of
the same truth. The previous growth of our manu-
factures with the new want of improved methods of
transport, was the condition precedent of our railways,
no less than the engineering skill and the mechanical
ingenuity which actually created and devised them.
The valley of the Tees, which a hundred years ago was
best known for its dairy produce, had already become
the centre of another and less charming form of in-
dustry when its little railway was constructed. That
the thing needed was found, and that the man was
ready who was best fitted to develope it, are facts
which we may recall with just pride.