Another incident of this period I should record here. I invited to Birkenhead most of the leading journalists and writers of London, having in view, of course, an intended invasion of the great metropolis. While these men were together I suggested the organization of a literary club, and this suggestion was the germ from which grew the Savage Club of London. My speech at the opening of the first street-railway in the Old World will appear in my forthcoming book of speeches.
As soon as I had completed my work in Birkenhead, I went to London, and opened a campaign for "tramways" in that metropolis of 4,000,000 people. It was a complex business from the first, and I had to make a study of the government and the conditions, and, above all, of the prejudices of citizens. The first step was to apply to every parish, for the parish there is our ward, and something more, for it has a far greater measure of home rule. Each parish had to grant permission for any tramway that was to invade its ancient and sacred precincts.
The greatest difficulty was the one I had most dreaded from the start--the opposition of the 'bus men. There are, or were at that time, 6,000 omnibuses in the streets of London, and in every one of the drivers, and in every one who was interested in the profits of the business, my tramway project had an unrelenting foe. I found that the influence of these men was tremendous, because they reached the masses of the people in a way that I could never hope to do. Their efforts were unremitting. They worked upon the different parish governments, upon the people at large, upon the municipal government, and upon Parliament itself. I believe they had sufficient influence to have carried the war even into the cabinet and to the throne.
However, as I shall soon relate, the opposition of the 'buses did not prove to be as terrible in the end as I had feared. The heaviest blows came from a higher source. The "people," in England, as elsewhere, seem very powerful at first, in the beginnings of all enterprises. To oppose them would seem to be inviting destruction. But in the end it is found that the real power is lodged elsewhere, and whenever this real power wants a thing done, the "people" do not exist. The fiction that they do exist disappears at once in the clear atmosphere of "exigency."