OF RAILWAYS. BY MORGAN RATTLER, ESQ. M.A. AN APPRENTICE OF THE LAW. LAST month, my old friend, OLIVER YORKE, was obliged by the pressure of Time and Space-of Circumstance, the unspiritual, and Expediency, the shabby divinity, to put the break upon my article in the middle of a sentence, and run me to a dead stop. But I reclaim the printed and published portion of my sentence; I assert my right to reduce it once more to manuscript, and amalgamate it with the remaining part. The passage will then run thus: Obviously these schemes for short railways, which are not, in the least, of national or imperial importance, ught to be carried out, and, when brought forward bona fide and wisely, will be carried out eventually by local proprietors, who invest their money; and this less with a view to the interest the capital may yield, than to the benefits they expect to derive from the work when constructed, and who have no design of gambling, or stagging, or bulling, or bearing, or practising any other kind of shabby trickery in the market. Such, I say, will be found to be the result, whatever the swindling, the letter-selling, the stock-jobbing, or have been in the be * agiotage, may ginning. Every railway bill, as Arago has justly observed, is, at bottom, a financial measure; but long lines-main trunk lines-are the affair of the empire, which cares comparatively nothing if there be a loss upon them as commercial speculations, so mighty and so multitudinous are the political and economic advantages they afford. But short lines, except in some very rare and peculiar instance, never, at the best, can, and never will, be more than mere commercial speculations for the investment of money, from which, directly or indirectly, an adequate return is expected. This distinction the statesman and the philosopher ought always to keep in view. The test to be applied to the value of every short line and every branch line, at bottom, amounts simply to this, "Will it pay?"-an absolute test that is in no sort to be applied to a main trunk line. The short line may be swept off the surface of the earth, and the removal of it will very slightly affect any portion of the country, save that which it traversed; will hardly concern any body, save the inhabitants and such other persons as may have invested their money in it. The traffic is never stopped or impeded for an hour; the transit alone is made slower, and the shorter the line the less material and delay. Destroy a main trunk line, and you, on the contrary, smite the internal commerce of the kingdom, as though it were with a stroke of paralysis. The relative importance in the reticulated system between short lines and long main lines is precisely similar to that which exists between the great arteries and the smaller veins in the human body. But to resume my more immediate subject, which, I trust, it will be recollected, was the inverted course pursued in Ireland as to the establishinent and formation of channels of intercommunication. England, before she took to making railways, had, by canals and navigable rivers, 4000 miles of inland navigation. Ireland, with infinitely greater natural facilities, has only 400. Yet Ireland will forthwith have a reticulated system of railways! be it! So And, undoubtedly, whatever may be the result as regards the payment and amount of interest on the capital expended, they must Arago, moreover, in his admirable Report, as chairman of the committee appointed in 1858 by the Chamber of Deputies to consider the plan for a reticulated System of railways in France proposed by the government, observes:-"Laws of finance and fundamentally it is a financial law we are about to discuss-should be established on firm grounds. Enthusiasm and the freaks of Imagination have, no doubt, their bright side; but let us be careful that they seduce us not into fiscal measures, from which the most numerous classes of society, already smitten by taxation on mere necessaries, may have to suffer." There is as much need for the caution in 1845 as in 1838-in Great Britain as in France. VOL. XXXIII. NO. CXCIII. H and will do much good in affording employment to the people, and introducing a knowledge of skilled labour into the country. And, perhaps, in this land of anomalies, railways, the last result of civilisation in a small country, may lead back the Irish to the use and enjoyment of some of its earlier and easier means and blessings,*-if, indeed, the Irish should not think fit to follow the advice of the blustering organ of Young Ireland, in tearing up the rails to make pikes, and destroying tunnels and bridges, in the attempt to massacre the Saxon soldiery. Ay, and the Highlands of Scotland will have their railways; in short, every region and every district will have its railway. Early copies of a magnificent map, in four large sheets, is now spread on the carpet before me: it is a 66 Railway Map of England, Wales, and Scotland, drawn from the Triangulation of the Ordnance Survey, the Survey of the Railway Companies, and other information; shewing the Lines of Railways, with their Stations, and Sections of Railways, the Inland Navigation, Great and Cross Roads, Cities, Markettowns, and Villages. By James Wyld, Geographer to the Queen and Prince Albert, Charing Cross East, London." This is the title of a noble piece of work. As I look down upon it, one is amazed to see what ample provision there already is in the United Kingdom for intercourse and intercommunication. I turn to a smaller map, on which the projected lines are laid down, as well as those actually made, or in progress, and I find the reticulated system thereon laid down as contemplated for Great Britain, startling at once in its mag And, nitude and its minuteness. then, if the propulsion of carriages on railways upon any atmospheric principle (I say any, because I understand no less than ten new patents have been lately granted) should be found to answer practically and commercially, the most mountainous regions will be scaled, and forced into communication with the existing groups of railways. But, vast as this prospect of iron roads is, a still more extensive vision opens before the eyes of a writer in the last number of the Westminster Review. His notion is, that the change now in progress is that of superseding stone roads by iron roads. He says, "The first road was a track; the second one made with rough and hard materials, sometimes paved, and more frequently thrown loose upon the ground; the third a macadamised road; and the number of private bills applied for be tween 1829 and 1833 for roads of this construction was 340. There are 27,000 miles of turnpike roads in Great Britain alone; and the public roads of all kinds, including both cross roads and turnpike roads, in Great Britain and Ireland, extend to a length of some. where about 150,000 miles! We have now to convert these stone roads, or the greater part of them, into iron roads, as speedily as may be practicable, and pos sibly (as the disposition to travel increases with facilities of travel) find room for twice the number. This is the work Englishmen have set themselves to do, and in this generation or the next they will do it." Indeed they will not, my fine fellow, either in this generation, or the next generation, or any gencration yet to come. Here is a specimen of the wild fancies that in this season of *Count Lally-Tolendal, in his essay on the life of the murdered Strafford-mur dered for his courage and genius-makes an observation about the condition of the Irish which is in great part true, and applicable still:-"La liberté politique n'est pour les hommes qu'un besoin secondaire et relatif. Le premier, l'absolu besoin, c'est la liberté personelle, c'est la securité de son repos, de son toit, de ses moissons: or depuis long temps les habitans de l'Irlande en étaient privés." That a vast multitude of them are still deprived of these primal blessings is well known to all who are acquainted with the country, and dare to speak the truth. In fact, the history of the Irish people, from our first acquaintance with the island to the present hour, is frightful and appalling. It is the history of the only populace in Europe to which the practical benefits of civilisation never have descended, to which a peaceful enjoyment of any thing like comfort never has occurred, to which security of life and property have been most rare, brief, and transient blessings, to which, in a word (say what you will of political, civil, and religious liberty), personal freedom has never yet been known. In this they are worse off than the cognate Celt of the Peninsula. minds of their children-is, "Time is money." But this, though true, is not a truth of universal application. IIundreds in our own country the fruges consumere natos-the lily-like gentlemen, "who toil not, neither do they spin," so far from converting time into money, spend largely in their efforts to kill the old enemy. When, however, the individual has remunerative occupation for the whole of his time not devoted to sleep, nourishment, exercise, and whatever else may be essentially necessary for the health of body and mind, then is time money in one sense of the word, because it may be figuratively said to be convertible into money. But then it is money of every denomination of value, and the worth of this time decreases di are railway frenzy haunt the brains of even clever and intelligent men! Why, it is as monstrous as a sick man's dream,-the ægroti somnium vanum. Stone roads, high and bye, never will be superseded so long as there are stones to be found upon the earth. You will have no main trunk stone roads, it is true,-no roads serving the purposes of arteries in the system of circulation by which travellers throughout the United Kingdom are conveyed; but roads from the humble pathway to the admirably constructed highway: ay, and canals, too, you always will, always must, have. Again and again be it enforced, that the question of the mere conveyance of goods and passengers from place to place is purely a financial question; and when only short, or comparatively short, distances have to be performed, such as may be got over in an hour or two, or a few hours, or half a day, or a whole night, the cheapest mode of conveyance for the vast multitude of the people always will be the best, and that which they will never fail to adopt. Now, it is utterly and absolutely impossible that railroads ever can, by any device or ingenuity of man, compete in cheapness of conveyance with rivers, or highroads, or even with canals. I recollect, that when the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway-bill passed, the liveliest apprehensions were entertained that the Forth and Clyde and Union Canals would be ruined. But what was the result? The speed of the fly-boats was increased, and the fares diminished; and the traffic, instead of dwindling away, has become greater than it was before the railway was constructed. And here, be it remembered, the distance traversed between the two termini will not fairly come under the denomination of a short distance; it took the mail coach upwards of four hours and a half to accomplish it. We must recollect, too, that if the canal be unaffected in its passenger-traffic, much more must it necessarily remain uninjured in the traffic in goods, and especially heavy goods. The favourite adage of the Americans that which as a moral sentence is inscribed on the dials of their clocks, and inculcated as the earliest and most important lesson upon the rectly as the distance for the traversing of which it is to be expended. During the parliamentary session, Mr. Austin's time, taking the whole of the twenty-four hours, is probably worth two guineas an hour, and to him very speedy transit, when he may desire it, is very valuable; but the Irish peasant, for whom you providing steamroads, earns sixpence, eightpence, tenpence, and, at the utmost, one shilling a-day. Take the highest figure, and then the value of his time will be one halfpenny an hour. Say he works twelve hours. Allow him seven hours for sleep, and two for taking his meals and smoking his pipe,-his dhudeen, or brulegeule. He has three to spare. Now is it not clear that he cannot afford to pay and ought not to pay one farthing for being rapidly conveyed over any distance which he can accomplish in three hours on a cart, or horse, or on foot, or in any way so it be without cost, or, at all events, with no greater cost than the three-halfpence which represent the value of his three hours, and constitute one-eighth of his revenue for the day, that surplus which, after the necessaries of the day are provided for, the soldier has to spend out of his pay, but which Paddy is not in a condition to afford to lay out for any thing save an absolute want, as his military friend may, who is housed and clad at the public expense? Would it not be not alone foolish but sinful for him to pay his threehalfpence a-mile, half, or his penny a-mile, a third of his day's wages, for being whisked, in eight or ten minutes, along a line four miles longfor, example, like that from London to Blackwall, when he could walk the distance in less than an hour? I for one think it would, and I am satisfied Paddy agrees with me. But Paddy is not peculiar in this feeling. Multitudes share with me the aversion to travelling by railway for a short distance, if there be any other conveyance on land or water. I hate the Greenwich and Blackwall railways-something for the ungrateful expense incidental to using them, and a great deal more for the bore and trouble. Now, if you want to go to either place from the site of Charing Cross, which ་་ Sorrowing Longshanks raised and which stood upon what is now you "To fan your cheek and raise your hair, And breathe like to a welcoming," you are whirled in an atmosphere fetid with smoke, on either railway, through regions pestilential and squalid as those of King Aidoneus, at which the gods themselves stand aghast,- τᾶ τε στυγέουσι θεοί πες, and placed, moreover, in no inconsiderable danger to boot on one, inasmuch as if by any accident the locomotive should get off the rails (an occurrence not uncommon on lines where they really do "go the pace"), it has only some four feet to pass before it would come into collision with a frail parapet, and so carry the train down a perpendicular descent per saltum of thirty feet, or right through the tiled roof of one of the miserable and debauched-looking houses alongside of which it runs. And then, as I said, there is the expense to boot. You must take a cab to the terminus, and suffer the an noyance besides of transferring yourself from one vehicle to another, which, if you be a traveller, with luggage and ladies, is extreme. For instance, after your voyage over a particularly rough bit of sea, you arrive at the pier of Kingstown Harbour, with Mrs. Oliver Yorke and the three Misses Yorke, all of whom are half dead from sea-sickness; up drives a sort of omnibus to the side of the packet-boat. "YORKE, you're wanted! See the four portmanteaus, and the thirteen parcels safely put the carpet-bags, the bonnet-boxes, into the vehicle!" You are con veyed to the Kingstown terminus. Holla, YORKE, you're wanted! See the luggage safely stowed away in the train!" Well, you're whisked along in ten minutes to the terminus in Dublin. Again, "YORKE, you're wanted!" See the luggage safe out. But that's not all; you have still got to make your way to the hotel. "YORKE, you're wanted!" See the luggage put with your family in and on a couple of covered cars; and, lastly, see them safe out again at the place of your final destination. Thus, within a distance of six miles, you have to superintend four removals of your luggage, and to count it over and watch it eight times; and, in addition to the railway fare, you have to pay for the supplemental use of a |