Strange portents were seen upon the road to Manchester in the early years of last century. About 1824 began the era of the fast day coaches, and fine vehicles, handsome horses, and decent harness were provided for the travelling public, instead of the springless tubs, wretched cattle, and harness composed chiefly of odd pieces of worn leather eked out with string, which made up the uncomfortable old night coaches. It was a new era in more than one sense, for this was that now historic period when horseless vehicles were first put upon the public roads.

The ’twenties of the nineteenth century were almost as remarkable for those early horseless vehicles, the steam carriages, as the present era is for petrol-driven and electric motor-cars. Railways, too, began early to threaten stage-and mail-coaching; and long, whirling, and involved controversies on road and rail traffic occupied the columns of the press, and overflowed into innumerable pamphlets.

Few people had sufficient imagination to foresee an era of mechanical locomotion; but one pamphleteer, who unfortunately elected to remain anonymous, published in 1824 what modern journalists with an insufficient English vocabulary would doubtless call a brochure on the subject. This booklet, entitled The Fingerpost, is, according to its title page, “By???.” Whoever he may have been who thus veiled his identity behind those triple notes of interrogation, he certainly was a seer. He foresaw our own times with limpid vision—and smelt them, too.

He thought it “reasonable to conclude that the nervous man will ere long take his place in a carriage drawn or impelled by a Locomotive Engine with more unconcern and with far better assurance of safety than he now disposes of himself in one drawn by four horses of unequal powers and speed, endued with passions that acknowledge no control but superior force, and each separately, momentarily, liable to all the calamities that flesh is heir to. Surely an inanimate power, that can be started, stopped, and guided at pleasure by the finger or foot of man, must promise greater personal security to the traveller than a power derivable from animal life.”

“I must ask him,” he continues, “to indulge his imagination with an excursion some twenty or thirty years forward in the regions of time; when the dark, unsightly, shapeless machine that now offends him, even in idea, shall he metamorphosed into one of exquisite symmetry and beauty, and as superbly emblazoned with heraldic honours as any that are now launched from the floors of Long Acre—a machine that may regale his nostrils with exhalations from some genial produce of the earth whose essence may be extracted at an insignificant cost, and its fragrance left on the breeze for the sensitive traveller’s gratification; that, instead of the rumble of coaches, may delight his ear with the concord of sweet sounds.”

Wonderful man: penetrating intuition! But barbaric conservatism blocked the way, and not thirty years, but a weary period of seventy-two, intervened between his day and the fulfilment of his dream. In 1896 the Motor Car came, and we have now our fill of “exhalations,” whose “fragrance” is “left on the breeze” in the form of stinking petrol and fried lubricating oil; while streets and roads are smothered in dust and, in a “concord of sweet sounds,” resound to the crashing of gears and the bellowing of motor-horns, like the bulls of Bashan afflicted with bronchitis.

But in that early experimental period a London and St. Albans Steam Carriage Company (among others) was formed, and made several trips with its uncouth monsters. Proposals were even made to establish a “steam-coach” service to Manchester, the coach to haul behind it a number of goods-waggons; but the turnpike authorities at Dunstable, anxious for the condition of their roads, hearing early of this proposition, were prepared for the unwelcome visitors, and, procuring cartloads of immense stones, strewed the highway with them. They certainly brought the “steam-coach” to a halt, but at the same time nearly wrecked the down Manchester mail; and it was a long while before the Post Office allowed them to forget their excess of zeal.