To those who unfailingly see the wise direction of Providence in everything, it would seem that Providence had thus raised up railway engineers and capitalists at the psychological moment; but the views of coach-proprietors, coachmen, guards, ostlers, innkeepers, and the innumerable others depending in one way or another upon the road for a living, did not, it is to be feared, look so complacently upon the new era which in many instances ruined them. Nor, perhaps, did those who were financially interested in canals ascribe the new order of things to providential interposition.

That, indeed, is providential which advances one’s own interests and preserves one’s well-being, but misfortunes are generally given a very different ascription. The providential interpositions that benefited one class inflicted very great hardship and loss upon another. The canals that were, before the introduction of railways, very great and keen competitors with the waggons, were frozen up in severe winters, and all traffic along them stopped, and thus the whole of the carrying trade went by road, greatly to the advantage of the turnpike trusts and the owners of waggons. Indeed, severe winters, if unaccompanied by snow, were in every way advantageous to the waggons, because the frost-bound roads gave good going, while “open” winters made the highways a sea of mud and almost impassable.

Although with the coming of the railways the stage-waggons swiftly disappeared from such direct commercial routes as those between London and Birmingham and London and Manchester, this ancient type of vehicle lingered amazingly on the purely agricultural roads leading to the Metropolis out of Kent, Sussex and Surrey. As the stage-waggon was the earliest of old road vehicles, so also it was the last; and even when the last coach came off the road, and people travelled only by train, there were still left not a few of the old waggons continuing their sober journeys, not in the least affected by the railways. They came to and set out from London very much as they had been used to do two hundred and forty years before, and resorted as of old to the ancient inns that lingered in such strongholds of the old road-faring interest as the Borough High Street, Aldgate and Whitechapel, and Bishopsgate Street. It is true they carried passengers no longer, for when railway travel came, and was cheap as well as speedy, there were none who could afford the time taken of old by waggon. It was cheaper to pay a railway fare, and thus save a day or even more. But with heavy goods it long remained far otherwise, and even into the ’sixties it was possible to see the lethargic waggons still ponderously coming to their haven out of Kent and Sussex at the “Talbot” in the Borough (only demolished in 1870), from the Eastern Counties to the “Blue Boar” or the “Saracen’s Head” in Aldgate, or from the North to the “Four Swans,” the “Bull,” or the “Green Dragon,” in Bishopsgate Street Within, precisely as they had done from the beginning, when Shakespeare was play-writing. They were built in the same fashion as of yore. The immense canvas-covered tilts had not changed their pattern, and their dim old horn lanterns were genuine antiques; their wheels, as clumsy as ever they had been, shrieked for grease and racked the ears of the lieges as they had always done; and the lieges swore at the waggoners and the waggoners cursed back at them in strange provincial dialects, just as their respective ancestors had been wont to do for more generations than one cares to count. The Londoner little imagined—because his imagination on any subject is small—when he looked dully upon these old conveyances, and the old inns to which they came, that he was gazing upon a survival of the age of Elizabeth; and while he was thus failing to realise the exquisite interest of what he saw, the “common stage waggons,” as they were technically named by Act of Parliament, ceased altogether off the face of the earth, and nearly all the old galleried inns were swept away.