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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78191 ***
+
+
+     “_Familiar in their Mouths as HOUSEHOLD WORDS._”—SHAKESPEARE.
+
+
+
+
+                            HOUSEHOLD WORDS.
+                           A WEEKLY JOURNAL.
+
+
+                     CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS.
+
+
+     N^{o.} 21.]      SATURDAY, AUGUST 17, 1850.      [PRICE 2_d._
+
+
+
+
+                   THE RAILWAY WONDERS OF LAST YEAR.
+
+
+The unblushing individual who inflated the first bubble prospectus in
+the early days of Railway scheming must regard, if he be still in
+existence (and we have good reason to believe that he lives, a
+prosperous gentleman), with superlative amazement the last Report of Her
+Majesty’s Railway Commissioners.
+
+When in his dazzling document the preposterous “promoter” certified the
+forthcoming goods transit at six times the amount his most sanguine
+“traffic-taker” could conscientiously compute; when he quadrupled the
+boldest calculations of the expected number of passengers—when, in
+short, he projected his prognostics beyond the widest bounds of
+probability, and then added a few cyphers at the end of each sum, to
+make “round numbers”—he was not so mad as to believe that he lied in the
+least like truth. Mad as he was _not_, he never could have supposed that
+an after-time would come when his lying prospectus would be pronounced
+as far short of, as his mendacious imagination endeavoured to make it
+exceed, the Truth. But that time has arrived.
+
+Let us suppose a friend of his, a far-seeing prophet, reading a proof of
+the pet prospectus by the aid of magnifying glasses; let us figure the
+statistical foreteller of future events assuring its author that, twenty
+years thence, his immeasurable exaggerations would be out-exaggerated by
+what should actually come to pass; that his brazen bait to catch
+share-jobbers would shrink—when placed beside the Railway records of
+eighteen-hundred-and-forty-nine—into a puny, minimised, understatement.
+How he would have laughed! How immediately his mind would have reverted
+from the sanguine seer to the terminus of flighty intellects known as
+Bedlam. With what remarkable unction he would have said, “Phoo! Phoo! My
+good fellow, you must be lapsing into lunacy. What! Do you mean to say I
+have not laid it on thick enough? Why, look here!” and he turns to the
+latest of the Stamp Office stage-coach returns: “Do you mean to tell
+me—now that coach travelling has arrived at perfection, and that the
+wonderful average of coach passengers is six millions a year—that,
+instead of quadrupling the number of travellers who are likely to use my
+line, I ought to multiply them by a hundred? Why, you may as well try to
+persuade me that I ought to promise for our locomotives twenty, instead
+of fifteen, miles an hour; which—Heaven forgive me—I have had the
+courage to set down. Stuff! If I were to romance at that rate, we should
+not sell a share.”
+
+And our would-be Major Longbow would have had reason for the faith that
+was in him. In his highest flights he dared not exceed too violently the
+statistics of G. R. Porter, or have added too high a premium on the
+expectations of George Stephenson. The former calculated that up to the
+end of 1834, when not a hundred miles of Railway were open, the annual
+average of persons who travelled by coach was about two millions, each
+going over one hundred and eighty miles of ground in the year.[1]
+Supposing each individual performed that distance in three journeys, the
+whole number of _persons_ must have multiplied themselves into six
+millions of _passengers_. As to speed, Mr. George Stephenson said at a
+dinner-party given to him at Newcastle in 1844, that when he planned the
+Liverpool and Manchester line, the directors entreated him, when they
+went to Parliament, not to talk of going at a faster rate than ten miles
+an hour, or he “would put a cross upon the concern.” Mr. George
+Stephenson _did_ talk of fifteen miles an hour, and some of the
+Committee asked if he were not mad! Mr. Nicholas Wood delivered himself
+in a pamphlet as follows:— “It is far from my wish to promulgate to the
+world that the ridiculous expectations, or rather _professions_, of the
+_enthusiastic speculatist_ will be realised, and that we shall see
+engines travelling at the rate of twelve, sixteen, eighteen, twenty
+miles an hour. Nothing could do more harm towards their general adoption
+and improvement than the promulgation of such NONSENSE!”
+
+Footnote 1:
+
+  “Porter’s Progress of the Nation,” vol. ii. p. 22.
+
+It would seem, then, that the Longbow of the aboriginal prospectuses was
+actually modest in his estimate as to passengers and speed. But only a
+few years must have made him utterly ashamed of his moderation and
+modesty. How disgusted he must have felt with his timid prolusions, even
+when 1843 arrived. For that year revealed travellers’ tales that
+exceeded his early romances by what Major Longbow himself would have
+called “an everlasting long chalk.” Within that year, seventy railroads,
+constructed at an outlay of sixty millions sterling, conveyed
+twenty-five millions of passengers three hundred and thirty millions of
+miles, at an average cost of one penny and three quarters per mile, and
+an average speed of twenty-four miles per hour, with but one fatal
+accident.
+
+But if our parent of railway proprietors were astonished at what
+happened in 1843, with what inconceivable amazement he must peruse the
+details of 1849! We should like to see the expression of his countenance
+while conning the report of Her Majesty’s Commissioners of Railways for
+last year. At the end of every sentence he would be sure to exclaim,
+“Who _would_ have thought it?”
+
+From this unimpeachable record of scarcely credible statistics, it
+appears that at the end of 1849 there were, in Great Britain and
+Ireland, five thousand five hundred and ninety-six miles of railway in
+active operation; upwards of four thousand five hundred and fifty-six of
+which are in England, eight hundred and forty-six in Scotland, and four
+hundred and ninety-four in Ireland. Besides this, the number of miles
+which have been authorised by Parliament, and still remain to be
+finished is six thousand and thirty; so that, if all the lines were
+completed, the three kingdoms would be intersected by a net-work of
+railroad measuring twelve thousand miles: but of this there is only a
+remote probability, the number of miles in course of active construction
+being no more than one thousand five hundred, so that by the end of the
+present year it is calculated that the length of finished and operative
+railway may be about seven thousand four hundred miles, or as many as
+lie between Great Britain and the Cape of Good Hope, with a thousand
+miles to spare. The number of persons employed on the 30th of June,
+1849, in the operative railways was fifty-four thousand; on the unopened
+lines, one hundred and four thousand.
+
+When the schemer of the infancy of the giant railway system turns to the
+passenger-account for the year 1849, he declares he is fairly “knocked
+over.” He finds that the railway passengers are put down at _sixty-three
+million eight hundred thousand_; nearly three times the number returned
+for 1843, and _a hundred times_ as many as took to the road in the days
+of stage-coaches. The passengers of 1849 actually double the sum of the
+entire population of the three kingdoms.
+
+The statement of capital which the six thousand miles now being hourly
+travelled over represents, will require the reader to draw a long
+breath;—it is one hundred and ninety-seven and a half millions of pounds
+sterling. Add to this the cash being disbursed for the lines in
+progress, the total rises to two hundred and twenty millions! The
+average cost of each mile of railway, including engines, carriages,
+stations, &c., (technically called “plant,”) is thirty-three thousand
+pounds.
+
+Has this outlay proved remunerative? The Commissioners tell us, that the
+gross receipts from all the railways in 1849 amounted to eleven
+millions, eight hundred and six thousand pounds; from which, if the
+working expenses be deducted at the rate of forty-three per cent. (being
+about an average taken from the published statements of a number of the
+principal companies), there remains a net available profit of about six
+millions seven hundred and twenty-nine thousand four hundred and twenty
+pounds to remunerate the holders of property to the amount of one
+hundred and ninety-seven millions and a half; or at the rate, within a
+fraction, of three and a half per cent. Here our parent of railway
+prospectuses chuckles. _He_ promised twenty per cent. per annum.
+
+In short, in everything except the dividends, our scheming friend finds
+that recent fact has outstripped his early fictions. He told the nervous
+old ladies and shaky “half-pays” on his projected line, that Railways
+were quite as safe as stage-coaches. What say the grave records of 1849?
+The lives of five passengers were lost during that year and those by one
+accident—a cause, of course, beyond the control of the victims; eighteen
+more casualties took place, for which the sufferers had themselves alone
+to blame. Five lives lost by official mismanagement, out of sixty-four
+millions of risks, is no very outrageous proportion; especially when we
+reflect that, taking as a basis the calculations of 1843, the number of
+miles travelled over per rail during last year, may be set down at eight
+hundred and forty-five millions; or _nine times the distance between the
+earth and the sun_.
+
+Such are the Railway wonders of the year of grace, one thousand eight
+hundred and forty-nine.
+
+
+
+
+                            THE WATER-DROPS.
+                             A FAIRY TALE.
+
+
+                           CHAPTER THE FIRST.
+
+    The Suitors of Cirrha, and the young Lady; with a reference to her
+                                   Papa.
+
+Far in the west there is a land mountainous, and bright of hue, wherein
+the rivers run with liquid light; the soil is all of yellow gold; the
+grass and foliage are of resplendent crimson; where the atmosphere is
+partly of a soft green tint, and partly azure. Sometimes on summer
+evenings we see this land, and then, because our ignorance must refer
+all things that we see, to something that we know, we say it is a mass
+of clouds made beautiful by sunset colours. We account for it by
+principles of Meteorology. The fact has been omitted from the works of
+Kaemtz or Daniell; but, notwithstanding this neglect, it is well known
+in many nurseries, that the bright land we speak of, is a world
+inhabited by fairies. Few among fairies take more interest in man’s
+affairs than the good Cloud Country People; this truth is established by
+the story I am now about to tell.
+
+Not long ago there were great revels held one evening in the palace of
+King Cumulus, the monarch of the western country. Cirrha, the daughter
+of the king, was to elect her future husband from a multitude of
+suitors. Cirrha was a maiden delicate and pure, with a skin white as
+unfallen snow; but colder than the snow her heart had seemed to all who
+sought for her affections. When Cirrha floated gracefully and slowly
+through her father’s hall, many a little cloud would start up presently
+to tread where she had trodden. The winds also pursued her; and even men
+looked up admiringly whenever she stepped forth into their sky. To be
+sure they called her Mackerel and Cat’s Tail, just as they call her
+father Ball of Cotton; for the race of man is a coarse race, and calling
+bad names appears to be a great part of its business here below.
+
+Before the revels were concluded, the King ordered a quiet little wind
+to run among the guests, and bid them all come close to him and to his
+daughter. Then he spoke to them as follows:—
+
+“Worthy friends! there are among you many suitors to my daughter Cirrha,
+who is pledged this evening to choose a husband. She bids me tell you
+that she loves you all; but since it is desirable that this our royal
+house be strengthened by a fit alliance with some foreign power, she has
+resolved to take as husband one of those guests who have come hither
+from the principality of Nimbus.” Now, Nimbus is that country, not
+seldom visible from some parts of our earth, which we have called the
+Rain-Cloud. “The subjects of the Prince of Nimbus,” Cumulus continued,
+“are a dark race, it is true, but they are famed for their beneficence.”
+
+Two winds, at this point, raised between themselves a great disturbance,
+so that there arose a universal cry that somebody should turn them out.
+With much trouble they were driven out from the assembly; thereupon,
+quite mad with jealousy and disappointment, they went howling off to
+sea, where they played pool-billiards with a fleet of ships, and so
+forgot their sorrow.
+
+King Cumulus resumed his speech, and said that he was addressing
+himself, now, especially to those of his good friends who came from
+Nimbus. “To-night, let them retire to rest, and early the next morning
+let each of them go down to Earth; whichever of them should be found on
+their return to have been engaged below in the most useful service to
+the race of man, that son of Nimbus should be Cirrha’s husband.”
+
+Cumulus, having said this, put a white nightcap on his head, which was
+the signal for a general retirement. The golden ground of his dominions
+was covered for the night, as well as the crimson trees, with cotton. So
+the whole kingdom was put properly to bed. Late in the night the moon
+got up, and threw over King Cumulus a silver counterpane.
+
+
+                          CHAPTER THE SECOND.
+
+The Adventures of Nebulus and Nubis.
+
+The suitors of the Princess Cirrha, who returned to Nimbus, were a-foot
+quite early the next morning, and petitioned their good-natured Prince
+to waft them over London. They had agreed among themselves, that by
+descending there, where men were densely congregated, they should have a
+greater chance of doing service to the human race. Therefore the
+Rain-Cloud floated over the great City of the World, and, as it passed
+at sundry points, the suitors came down upon rain-drops to perform their
+destined labour. Where each might happen to alight depended almost
+wholly upon accident; so that their adventures were but little better
+than a lottery for Cirrha’s hand. One, who had been the most
+magniloquent among them all, fell with his pride upon the patched
+umbrella of an early-breakfast woman, and from thence was shaken off
+into a puddle. He was splashed up presently, mingled with soil, upon the
+corduroys of a labourer, who stopped for breakfast on his way to work.
+From thence, evaporating, he returned crest-fallen to the Land of
+Clouds.
+
+Among the suitors there were two kind-hearted fairies, Nebulus and
+Nubis, closely bound by friendship to each other. While they were in
+conversation, Nebulus, who suddenly observed that they were passing over
+some unhappy region, dropped, with a hope that he might bless it. Nubis
+passed on, and presently alighted on the surface of the Thames.
+
+The district which had wounded the kind heart of Nebulus was in a part
+of Bermondsey, called Jacob’s Island. The fairy fell into a ditch; out
+of this, however, he was taken by a woman, who carried him to her own
+home, among other ditch-water, within a pail. Nebulus abandoned himself
+to complete despair, for what claim could he now establish on the hand
+of Cirrha? The miserable plight of the poor fairy we may gather from a
+description given by a son of man of the sad place to which he had
+descended. “In this Island may be seen, at any time of the day, women
+dipping water, with pails attached by ropes to the backs of the houses,
+from a foul fetid ditch, its banks coated with a compound of mud and
+filth, and strewed with offal and carrion; the water to be used for
+every purpose, culinary ones not excepted; although close to the place
+whence it is drawn, filth and refuse of various kinds are plentifully
+showered into it from the outhouses of the wooden houses overhanging its
+current, or rather slow and sluggish stream; their posts or supporters
+rotten, decayed, and, in many instances broken and the filth dropping
+into the water, to be seen by any passer by. During the summer, crowds
+of boys bathe in the putrid ditches, where they must come in contact
+with abominations highly injurious.”[2]
+
+Footnote 2:
+
+  Report of Mr. Bowie on the cause of Cholera in Bermondsey.
+
+So Nebulus was carried in a pail out of the ditch to a poor woman’s
+home, and put into a battered saucepan with some other water. Thence,
+after boiling, he was poured into an earthen tea-pot over some stuff of
+wretched flavour, said to be tea. Now, thought the fairy, after all, I
+may give pleasure at the breakfast of these wretched people. He pictured
+to himself a scene of love as preface to a day of squalid toil, but he
+experienced a second disappointment. The woman took him to another room
+of which the atmosphere was noisome; there he saw that he was destined
+for the comfort of a man and his two children, prostrate upon the floor
+beneath a heap of rags. These three were sick; the woman swore at them,
+and Nebulus shrunk down into the bottom of the tea-pot. Even the thirst
+of fever could not tolerate too much of its contents, so Nebulus, after
+a little time, was carried out and thrown into a heap of filth upon the
+gutter.
+
+Nubis, in the meantime, had commenced his day with hope of a more
+fortunate career. On falling first into the Thames he had been much
+annoyed by various pollutions, and been surprised to find, on kissing a
+few neighbour drops, that their lips tasted inky. This was caused, they
+said, by chalk pervading the whole river in the proportion of sixteen
+grains to the gallon. That was what made their water inky to the taste
+of those who were accustomed to much purer draughts. “It makes,” they
+explained, “our river-water hard, according to man’s phrase; so hard as
+to entail on multitudes who use it, some disease, with much expense and
+trouble.”
+
+“But all the mud and filth,” said Nubis, “surely no man drinks that?”
+
+“No,” laughed the River-Drops, “not all of it. Much of the water used in
+London passes through filters, and a filter suffers no mud or any
+impurity to pass, except what is dissolved. The chalk is dissolved, and
+there is filth and putrid gas dissolved.”
+
+“That is a bad business,” said Nubis, who already felt his own drops
+exercising that absorbent power for which water is so famous, and
+incorporating in their substance matters that the Rain-Cloud never knew.
+
+Presently Nubis found himself entangled in a current, by which he was
+sucked through a long pipe into a meeting of Water-Drops, all summoned
+from the Thames. He himself passed through a filter, was received into a
+reservoir, and, having asked the way of friendly neighbours, worked for
+himself with small delay a passage through the mainpipe into London.
+
+Bewildered by his long, dark journey underground, Nubis at length saw
+light, and presently dashed forth out of a tap into a pitcher. He saw
+that there was fixed under the tap a water-butt, but into this he did
+not fall. A crowd of women holding pitchers, saucepans, pails, were
+chattering and screaming over him, and the anxiety of all appeared to be
+to catch the water as it ran out of the tap, before it came into the tub
+or cistern. Nubis rejoiced that his good fortune brought him to a
+district in which it might become his privilege to bless the poor, and
+his eye sparkled as his mistress, with many rests upon the way, carried
+her pitcher and a heavy pail upstairs. She placed both vessels, full of
+water, underneath her bed, and then went out again for more, carrying a
+basin and a fish-kettle. Nubis pitied the poor creature, heartily
+wishing that he could have poured out of a tap into the room itself to
+save the time and labour of his mistress.
+
+The pitcher wherein the good fairy lurked, remained under the bed
+through the remainder of that day, and during the next night, the room
+being, for the whole time, closely tenanted. Long before morning, Nubis
+felt that his own drops and all the water near him had lost their
+delightful coolness, and had been busily absorbing smells and vapours
+from the close apartment. In the morning, when the husband dipped a
+teacup in the pitcher, Nubis readily ran into it, glad to escape from
+his unwholesome prison. The man putting the water to his lips, found it
+so warm and repulsive, that, in a pet, he flung it from the window, and
+it fell into the water-butt beneath.
+
+The water-butt was of the common sort, described thus by a member of the
+human race:— “Generally speaking, the wood becomes decomposed and
+covered with fungi; and indeed, I can best describe their condition by
+terming them filthy.” This water-butt was placed under the same shed
+with a neglected cesspool, from which the water—ever absorbing—had
+absorbed pollution. It contained a kitten among other trifles. “How many
+people have to drink out of this butt?” asked Nubis. “Really I cannot
+tell you,” said a neighbour Drop. “Once I was in a butt in Bethnal
+Green, twenty-one inches across, and a foot deep, which was to supply
+forty-eight families.[3] People store for themselves, and when they know
+how dirty these tubs are, they should not use them.” “But the labour of
+dragging water home, the impossibility of taking home abundance, the
+pollution of keeping it in dwelling-rooms and under beds.” “Oh, yes,”
+said the other Drop; “all very true. Besides, our water is not of a sort
+to keep. In this tub there is quite a microscopic vegetable garden, so I
+heard a doctor say who yesterday came hither with a party to inspect the
+district. One of them said he had a still used only for distilling
+water, and that one day, by chance, the bottoms of a series of
+distillations boiled to dryness. Thereupon, the dry mass became heated
+to the decomposing point, and sent abroad a stench plain to the dullest
+nose as the peculiar stench of decomposed organic matter. It infected,
+he said, the produce of many distillations afterwards.”[4] “I tell you
+what,” said Nubis, “water may come down into this town innocent enough,
+but it’s no easy matter for it to remain good among so many causes of
+corruption. Heigho!” Then he began to dream of Princess Cirrha and the
+worthy Prince of Nimbus, until he was aroused by a great tumult. It was
+an uproar caused by drunken men. “Why are those men so?” said Nubis to
+his friend. “I don’t know,” said the Water-Drop, “but I saw many people
+in that way last night, and I have seen them so at Bethnal Green.” A
+woman pulled her husband by, with loud reproaches for his visits to the
+beer-shop. “Why,” cried the man, with a great oath, “where would you
+have me go for drink?” Then, with another oath, he kicked the water-butt
+in passing—“You would not have me to go there!” All the bystanders
+laughed approvingly, and Nubis bade adieu to his ambition for the hand
+of Cirrha.
+
+Footnote 3:
+
+  Report of Dr. Gavin.
+
+Footnote 4:
+
+  Evidence of Mr. J. T. Cooper, Practical Chemist.
+
+
+                           CHAPTER THE THIRD.
+
+  Nephelo goes into Polite Society, and then into a Dungeon.—His Escape,
+    Recapture, and his Perilous Ascent into the Sky, surrounded by a
+    Blaze of Fire.
+
+Nephelo was a light-hearted subject of the Prince of Nimbus. It is he
+who often floats, when the whole cloud is dark, as a white vapour on the
+surface. For love of Cirrha, he came down behind a team of rain-drops
+and leapt into the cistern of a handsome house at the west end of
+London.
+
+Nephelo found the water in the cistern greatly vexed at riotous
+behaviour on the part of a large number of animalcules. He was told that
+Water-Drops had been compelled to come into that place, after undergoing
+many hardships, and had unavoidably brought with them germs of these
+annoying creatures. Time and place favouring, nothing could hinder them
+from coming into life; the cistern was their cradle, although many of
+them were already anything but babes. Hereupon, Nephelo himself was
+dashed at by an ugly little fellow like a dragon, but an uglier fellow,
+who might be a small Saint George, pounced at the dragon, and the heart
+of the poor fairy was the scene of contest.
+
+After a while, there was an arrival of fresh water from a pipe, the flow
+of which stirred up the anger of some decomposing growth which lined the
+sides and bottom of the cistern. So there was a good deal of confusion
+caused, and it was some time before all parties settled down into their
+proper places.
+
+“The sun is very hot,” said Nephelo. “We all seem to be getting very
+warm.” “Yes, indeed,” said a Lady-Drop; “it’s not like the cool
+Cloud-Country. I have been poisoned in the Thames, half filtered, and
+made frowsy by standing, this July weather, in an open reservoir. I’ve
+travelled in pipes laid too near the surface to be cool, and now am
+spoiling here. I know if water is not cold it can’t be pleasant.” “Ah,”
+said an old Drop, with a small eel in one of his eyes; “I don’t wonder
+at hearing tell that men drink wine, and tea, and beer.” “Talking of
+beer,” said another, “is it a fact that we’re of no use to the brewers?
+Our character’s so bad, they can’t rely on us for cooling the worts, and
+so sink wells, in order to brew all the year round with water cold
+enough to suit their purposes.” “I know nothing of beer,” said Nephelo;
+“but I know that if the gentlemen and ladies in this cistern were as
+cold as they could wish to be, there wouldn’t be so much decomposition
+going on amongst them.” “Your turn in, Sir,” said a polite Drop, and
+Nephelo leapt nimbly through the place of exit into a china jug placed
+ready to receive him. He was conveyed across a handsome kitchen by a
+cook, who declared her opinion that the morning’s rain had caused the
+drains to smell uncommonly. Nephelo then was thrown into a kettle.
+
+Boiling is to an unclean Water-Drop, like scratching to a bear, a
+pleasant operation. It gets rid of the little animals by which it had
+been bitten, and throws down some of the impurity with which it had been
+soiled. So, after boiling, water becomes more pure, but it is, at the
+same time, more greedy than ever to absorb extraneous matter. Therefore,
+the sons of men who boil their vitiated water ought to keep it covered
+afterwards, and if they wish to drink it cold, should lose no time in
+doing so. Nephelo and his friends within the kettle danced with delight
+under the boiling process. Chattering pleasantly together, they compared
+notes of their adventures upon earth, discussed the politics of
+Cloud-Land, and although it took them nearly twice as long to boil as it
+would have done had there been no carbonate of lime about them, they
+were quite sorry when the time was come for them to part. Nephelo then,
+with many others, was poured out into an urn. So he was taken to the
+drawing-room, a hot iron having, in a friendly manner, been put down his
+back, to keep him boiling.
+
+Out of the urn into the tea-pot; out of the tea-pot into the slop-basin;
+Nephelo had only time to remark a matron tea-maker, young ladies
+knitting, and a good-looking young gentleman upon his legs, laying the
+law down with a tea-spoon, before he (the fairy, not the gentleman) was
+smothered with a plate of muffins. From so much of the conversation as
+Nephelo could catch, filtered through muffin, it appeared that they were
+talking about tea.
+
+“It’s all very well for you to say, mother, that you’re confident you
+make tea very good, but I ask—no, there I see you put six spoonfuls in
+for five of us. Mother, if this were not hard water—(here there was a
+noise as of a spoon hammering upon the iron)—two spoonsful less would
+make tea of a better flavour and of equal strength. Now, there are three
+hundred and sixty-five times and a quarter tea-times in the year——”
+
+“And how many spoonfuls, brother, to the quarter of a tea-time?”
+
+“Maria, you’ve no head for figures. I say nothing of the tea consumed at
+breakfast. Multiply——”
+
+“My dear boy, you have left school; no one asks you to multiply. Hand me
+the muffin.”
+
+Nephelo, released, was unable to look about him, owing to the high walls
+of the slop-basin which surrounded him on every side. The room was
+filled with pleasant sunset light, but Nephelo soon saw the coming
+shadow of the muffin-plate, and all was dark directly afterwards.
+
+“Take cooking, mother. M. Soyer[5] says you can’t boil many vegetables
+properly in London water. Greens won’t be green; French beans are tinged
+with yellow, and peas shrivel. It don’t open the pores of meat, and make
+it succulent, as softer water does. M. Soyer believes that the true
+flavour of meat cannot be extracted with hard water. Bread does not rise
+so well when made with it. Horses——”
+
+Footnote 5:
+
+  Evidence before the Board of Health.
+
+“My dear boy, M. Soyer don’t cook horses.”
+
+“Horses, Dr. Playfair tells us, sheep, and pigeons will refuse hard
+water if they can get it soft, though from the muddiest pool.
+Racehorses, when carried to a place where the water is notoriously hard,
+have a supply of softer water carried with them to preserve their good
+condition. Not to speak of gripes, hard water will assuredly produce
+what people call a staring coat.”
+
+“Ah, no doubt, then, it was London water that created Mr. Blossomley’s
+blue swallowtail.”
+
+“Maria, you make nonsense out of everything. When you are Mrs.
+Blossomley——”
+
+“Now pass my cup.”
+
+There was a pause and a clatter. Presently the muffin-plate was lifted,
+and four times in succession there were black dregs thrown into the face
+of Nephelo. After the perpetration of these insults he was once again
+condemned to darkness.
+
+“When you are Mrs. Blossomley, Maria,” so the voice went on, “when you
+are Mrs. Blossomley, you will appreciate what I am now going to tell you
+about washerwomen.”
+
+“Couldn’t you postpone it, dear, until I am able to appreciate it. You
+promised to take us to Rachel to-night.”
+
+“Ah!” said another girlish voice, “you’ll not escape. We dress at seven.
+Until then—for the next twelve minutes you may speak. Bore on, we will
+endure.”
+
+“As for you, Catherine, Maria teaches you, I see, to chatter. But if
+Mrs. B. would object to the reception of a patent mangle as a wedding
+present from her brother, she had better hear him now. Washerwoman’s
+work is not a thing to overlook, I tell you. Before a shirt is worn out,
+there will have been spent upon it five times its intrinsic value in the
+washing-tub. The washing of clothes costs more, by a great deal, than
+the clothes themselves. The yearly cost of washing to a household of the
+middle class amounts, on the average, to about a third part of the
+rental, or a twelfth part of the total income. Among the poor, the
+average expense of washing will more probably be half the rental if they
+wash at home, but not more than a fourth of it if they employ the Model
+Wash-houses. The weekly cost of washing to a poor man averages certainly
+not less than fourpence halfpenny. Small tradesmen, driven to economise
+in linen, spend perhaps not more than ninepence; in the middle and the
+upper classes, the cost weekly varies from a shilling to five shillings
+for each person, and amounts very often to a larger sum. On these
+grounds Mr. Bullar, Honorary Secretary to the Association for Promoting
+Baths and Wash-houses, estimates the washing expenditure of London at a
+shilling a week for each inhabitant, or, for the whole, five millions of
+pounds yearly. Professor Clark—”
+
+“My dear Professor Tom, you have consumed four of your twelve minutes.”
+
+“Professor Clark judges from such estimates as can be furnished by the
+trade, that the consumption of soap in London is fifteen pounds to each
+person per annum—twice as much as is employed in other parts of England.
+That quantity of soap costs six-and-eightpence; water, per head, costs
+half as much, or three-and-fourpence; or each man’s soap and water
+costs, throughout London, on an average, ten shillings for twelve
+months. If the hardness of the water be diminished, there is a
+diminution in the want of soap. For every grain of carbonate of lime
+dissolved in each gallon of any water, Mr. Donaldson declares, two
+ounces of soap more for a hundred gallons of that water are required.
+Every such grain is called a degree of hardness. Water of five degrees
+of hardness requires, for example, two ounces of soap; water of eight
+degrees of hardness then will need fifteen; and water of sixteen degrees
+will demand thirty-two. Sixteen degrees, Maria, is the hardness of
+Thames Water—of the water, mother, which has poached upon your
+tea-caddy. You see, then, that when we pay for the soap we use at the
+rate of six-and-eightpence each, since the unusual hardness of our water
+causes us to use a double quantity, every man in London pays at an
+average rate of three-and-fourpence a year his tax for a hard water,
+through the cost of soap alone.”
+
+“Now you must finish in five minutes, brother Tom.”
+
+“But soap is not the only matter that concerns the washerwoman and her
+customers. There is labour also, and the wear and tear; there is a
+double amount of destruction to our linen, involved in the double time
+of rubbing and the double soaping, which hard water compels washerwomen
+to employ. So that, when all things have been duly reckoned up in our
+account, we find that the outlay caused by the necessities for washing
+linen in a town supplied like London with exceedingly hard water, is
+four times greater than it would be if soft water were employed. The
+cost of washing, as I told you, has been estimated at five millions a
+year. So that, if these calculations be correct, more than three
+millions of money, nearly four millions, is the amount filched yearly
+from the Londoners by their hard water through the wash-tub only. To
+that sum, Mrs. Blossomley, being of a respectable family and very
+partial to clean linen, will contribute of course much more than her
+average proportion.”
+
+“Well, Mr. Orator, I was not listening to all you said, but what I heard
+I do think much exaggerated.”
+
+“I take it, sister, from the Government Report; oblige me by believing
+half of it, and still the case is strong. It is quite time for people to
+be stirring.”
+
+“So it is, I declare. Your twelve minutes are spent, and we will always
+be ready for the play. If you talk there of water, I will shriek.”
+
+Here there arose a chatter which Nephelo found to be about matters that,
+unlike the water topic, did not at all interest himself. There was a
+rustle and a movement; and a creaking noise approached the drawing-room,
+which Nephelo discovered presently to be caused by Papa’s boots as he
+marched upstairs after his post-prandial slumberings. There was more
+talk uninteresting to the fairy; Nephelo, therefore, became drowsy; his
+drowsiness might at the Same time have been aggravated by the close
+confinement he experienced in an unwholesome atmosphere beneath the
+muffin-plate. He was aroused by a great clattering; this the maid caused
+who was carrying him down stairs upon a tray with all the other
+tea-things.
+
+From a sweet dream of nuptials with Cirrha, Nephelo was awakened to the
+painful consciousness that he had not yet succeeded in effecting any
+great good for the human race; he had but rinsed a tea-pot. With a faint
+impulse of hope the desponding fairy noticed that the slop-basin in
+which he sate was lifted from the tray, in a few minutes after the tray
+had been deposited upon the kitchen-dresser. Pity poor Nephelo! By a
+remorseless scullery-maid he was dashed rudely from the basin into a
+trough of stone, from which he tumbled through a hole placed there on
+purpose to engulf him,—tumbled through into a horrible abyss.
+
+This abyss was a long dungeon running from back to front beneath the
+house, built of bricks—rotten now, and saturated with moisture. Some of
+the bricks had fallen in, or crumbled into nothingness; and Nephelo saw
+that the soil without the dungeon was quite wet. The dungeon-floor was
+coated with pollutions, travelled over by a sluggish shallow stream,
+with which the fairy floated. The whole dungeon’s atmosphere was foul
+and poisonous. Nephelo found now what those exhalations were which rose
+through every opening in the house, through vent-holes and the
+burrowings of rats; for rats and other vermin tenanted this noisome den.
+This was the pestilential gallery called by the good people of the
+house, their drain. A trap-door at one end confined the fairy in this
+place with other Water-Drops, until there should be collected a
+sufficient body of them to negotiate successfully for egress.
+
+The object of this door was to prevent the ingress of much more foul
+matter from without; and its misfortune was, that in so doing it
+necessarily pent up a concentrated putrid gas within. At length Nephelo
+escaped; but alas! it was from a Newgate to a Bastille—from the drain
+into the sewer. This was a long vaulted prison running near the surface
+underneath the street. Shaken by the passage overhead of carriages, not
+a few bricks had fallen in; and Nephelo hurrying forward, wholly
+possessed by the one thought—could he escape?—fell presently into a
+trap. An oyster-shell had fixed itself upright between two bricks
+unevenly jointed together; much solid filth had grown around it; and in
+this Nephelo was caught. Here he remained for a whole month, during
+which time he saw many floods of water pass him, leaving himself with a
+vast quantity of obstinate encrusted filth unmoved. At the month’s end
+there came some men to scrape, and sweep, and cleanse; then with a
+sudden flow of water, Nephelo was forced along, and presently, with a
+large number of emancipated foulnesses, received his discharge from
+prison, and was let loose upon the River Thames.
+
+Nephelo struck against a very dirty Drop. “Keep off, will you?” the Drop
+exclaimed. “You are not fit to touch a person, sewer-bird.”
+
+“Why, where are you from, my sweet gentleman?”
+
+“Oh! I? I’ve had a turn through some Model Drains. Tubular drains, they
+call ’em. Look at me; isn’t that clear?”
+
+“There’s nothing clear about you,” replied Nephelo. “What do you mean by
+Model Drains?”
+
+“I mean I’ve come from Upper George Street through a twelve-inch pipe
+four or five times faster than one travels over an old sewer-bed;
+travelled express, no stoppage.”
+
+“Indeed!”
+
+“Yes. Impermeable, earthenware, tubular pipes, accurately dove-tailed. I
+come from an experimental district. When it’s all settled, there’s to be
+water on at high pressure everywhere, and an earthenware drain pipe
+under every tap, a tube of no more than the necessary size. Then these
+little pipes are to run down the earth; and there’s not to be a great
+brick drain running underneath each house into the street; the pipes run
+into a larger tube of earthenware that is to be laid at the backs of all
+the houses; these tubes run into larger ones, but none of them very
+monstrous; and so that there is a constant flow, like circulation of the
+blood; and all the pipes are to run at last into one large conduit,
+which is to run out of town with all the sewage matter and discharge so
+far down the Thames, that no return tide ever can bring it back to
+London. Some is to go branching off into the fields to be manure.”
+
+“Humph!” said Nephelo. “You profess to be very clever. How do you know
+all this?”
+
+“Know? Bless you, I’m a regular old Thames Drop I’ve been in the
+cisterns, in the tumblers, down the sewers, in the river, up the pipes,
+in the reservoirs, in the cisterns, in the teapots, down the sewers, in
+the river, up the pipes, in the reservoirs, in the cisterns, in the
+saucepans, down the sewers, in the Thames—”
+
+“Hold! Stop there now!” said Nephelo. “Well, so you have heard a great
+deal in your lifetime. You’ve had some adventures, doubtless?”
+
+“I believe you,” said the Cockney-Drop. “The worst was when I was pumped
+once as fresh water into Rotherhithe. That place is below high-water
+mark; so are Bermondsey and St. George’s, Southwark. Newington, St.
+Olave’s, Westminster, and Lambeth, are but little better. Well, you
+know, drains of the old sort always leak, and there’s a great deal more
+water poured into London than the Londoners have stowage room for, so
+the water in low districts can’t pass off at high water, and there ’s a
+precious flood. We sopped the ground at Rotherhithe, but I thought I
+never should escape again.”
+
+“Will the new pipes make any difference to that?”
+
+“Yes; so I am led to understand. They are to be laid with a regular
+fall, to pass the water off, which, being constant, will be never in
+excess. The fall will be to a point of course below the water level, and
+at a convenient place the contents of these drains are to be pumped up
+into the main sewer. Horrible deal of death caused, Sir, by the damp in
+those low districts. One man in thirty-seven died of cholera in
+Rotherhithe last year, when in Clerkenwell, at sixty-three feet above
+high water, there died but one in five hundred and thirty. The
+proportion held throughout.”
+
+“Ah, by the bye, you have heard, of course, complainings of the quality
+of water. Will the Londoners sink wells for themselves?”
+
+“Wells! What a child you are! Just from the clouds, I see. Wells in a
+large town get horribly polluted. They propose to consolidate and
+improve two of the best Thames Water Companies, the Grand Junction and
+Vauxhall, for the supply of London, until their great scheme can be
+introduced; and to maintain them afterwards as a reserve guard in case
+their great scheme shouldn’t prove so triumphant as they think it will
+be.”
+
+“What is this great scheme, I should like to know?”
+
+“Why, they talk of fetching rain-water from a tract of heath between
+Bagshot and Farnham. The rain there soaks through a thin crust of
+growing herbage, which is the only perfect filter, chemical as well as
+mechanical—the living rootlets extract more than we can, where impurity
+exists. Then, Sir, the rain runs into a large bed of siliceous sand,
+placed over marl; below the marl there is siliceous sand again—Ah, I
+perceive you are not geological.”
+
+“Go on.”
+
+“The sand, washed by the rains of ages, holds the water without soiling
+it more than a glass tumbler would, and the Londoners say that in this
+way, by making artificial channels and a big reservoir, they can collect
+twenty-eight thousand gallons a day of water nearly pure. They require
+forty thousand gallons, and propose to get the rest in the same
+neighbourhood from tributaries of the River Wey, not quite so pure, but
+only half as hard, as Thames water, and unpolluted.”
+
+“How is it to get to London?”
+
+“Through a covered aqueduct. Covered for coolness’ sake, and
+cleanliness. Then it is to be distributed through earthenware pipes,
+laid rather deep, again for coolness’ sake in the first instance, but
+for cleanliness as well. The water is to come in at high pressure, and
+run in iron or lead pipes up every house, scale every wall. There is to
+be a tap in every room, and under every tap there is to be the entrance
+to a drain pipe. Where water supply ends, drainage begins. They are to
+be the two halves of a single system. Furthermore, there are to be
+numbers of plugs opening in every street, and streets and courts are to
+be washed out every morning, or every other morning, as the traffic may
+require, with hose and jet. The Great Metropolis mustn’t be dirty, or be
+content with rubbing a finger here and there over its dirt. It is to
+have its face washed every morning, just before the hours of business.
+The water at high pressure is to set people’s invention at work upon the
+introduction of hydraulic apparatus for cranes, et cætera, which now
+cause much hand labour and are scarcely worth steam-power.
+Furthermore——”
+
+“My dear friend,” cried Nephelo, “you are too clever. More than half of
+what you say is unintelligible to me,”
+
+“But the grand point,” continued the garrulous Thames drop, “is the
+expense. The saving of cisterns, ball-cocks, plumbers’ bills, expansive
+sewer-works, constant repairs, hand labour, street sweeping, soap, tea,
+linen, fuel, steam-boilers now damaged by incrustation, boards,
+salaries, doctors’ bills, time, parish rates——”
+
+The catalogue was never ended, for the busy Drop was suddenly entangled
+among hair upon the corpse of a dead cat, which fate also the fairy
+narrowly escaped, to be in the next minute sucked up as Nubis had been
+sucked, through pipes into a reservoir. Weary with the incessant
+chattering of his conceited friend, whose pride he trusted that a night
+with puss might humble, Nephelo now lurked silent in a corner. In a
+dreamy state he floated with the current underground, and was half
+sleeping in a pipe under some London street, when a great noise of
+trampling overhead, mingled with cries, awakened him.
+
+“What is the matter now?” the fairy cried.
+
+“A fire, no doubt, to judge by the noise,” said a neighbour quietly.
+Nephelo panted now with triumph. Cirrha was before his eyes. Now he
+could benefit the race of man.
+
+“Let us get out,” cried Nephelo; “let us assist in running to the
+rescue.”
+
+“Don’t be impatient,” said a drowsy Drop. “We can’t get out of here till
+they have found the Company’s turncock, and then he must go to this plug
+and that plug in one street, and another, before we are turned off.”
+
+“In the meantime the fire——”
+
+“Will burn the house down. Help in five minutes would save a house. Now
+the luckiest man will seldom have his premises attended to in less than
+twenty.”
+
+Nephelo thought here was another topic for his gossip in the Thames. The
+plugs talked of with a constant water supply would take the sting out of
+the Fire-Fiend.
+
+Presently, among confused movements, confused sounds, amid a rush of
+water, Nephelo burst into the light—into the vivid light of a great fire
+that leapt and roared as Nephelo was dashed against it! Through the red
+flames and the black smoke in a burst of steam, the fairy reascended
+hopeless to the clouds.
+
+
+                          CHAPTER THE FOURTH.
+
+                Rascally Conduct of the Prince of Nimbus.
+
+The Prince of Nimbus, whose goodnature we have celebrated, was not good
+for nothing. Having graciously permitted all the suitors of the Princess
+Cirrha to go down to earth and labour for her hand, he took advantage of
+their absence, and, having the coast clear, importuned the daughter of
+King Cumulus with his own addresses. Cirrha was not disposed to listen
+to them, but the rogue her father was ambitious. He desired to make a
+good alliance, and that object was better gained by intermarriage with a
+prince than with a subject. “There will be an uproar,” said the old man,
+“when those fellows down below come back. They will look black and no
+doubt storm a little, but we’ll have our royal marriage
+notwithstanding.” So the Prince of Nimbus married Cirrha, and Nephelo
+arrived at the court of King Cumulus one evening during the celebration
+of the bridal feast. His wrath was seen on earth in many parts of
+England in the shape of a great thunderstorm on the 16th of July. The
+adventures of the other suitors, they being thus cheated of their
+object, need not be detailed. As each returns he will be made acquainted
+with the scandalous fraud practised by the Prince of Nimbus, and this
+being the state of politics in Cloud-Land at the moment when we go to
+press, we may fairly expect to witness five or six more thunderstorms
+before next winter. Each suitor, as he returns and finds how shamefully
+he has been cheated, will create a great disturbance; and no wonder.
+Conduct so rascally as that of the Prince of Nimbus is enough to fill
+the clouds with uproar.
+
+
+
+
+                        A CHRISTIAN BROTHERHOOD.
+
+
+There is an establishment in Paris, for providing instruction for
+artisans of all ages and others employed during the day, which is well
+worthy of imitation in this country. It has occasioned the
+establishment, in all parts of France, of a number of evening schools,
+at which instruction is given without charge to the pupil. We are by no
+means clear that in this respect a sound principle is observed; holding
+it to be important that those who _can_ pay anything for the great
+advantages of education should pay something, however little. But into
+this question we do not now propose to enter.
+
+The institution was originated in 1680, by Dr. J. Baptiste de la Lulli,
+Canon of Rheims, lingered on till 1804, but was revived and brought to
+its present condition of efficacy in 1830. It consists of a parent or
+training establishment in Paris (Rue Plumet, 33) from which teachers are
+provided for any locality, in any part of France, or even Italy, for
+which an evening school may be petitioned by the residents. There are
+connected with it at present no fewer than five thousand teachers, who
+call themselves “Brothers of the Christian Schools” (_Frères des Ecoles
+Chrétiennes_). Four thousand are employed in France, and one thousand in
+Italy. They are not a Church, but a Lay Community (_Religieux laïques_).
+A certain number remain ready at the central establishment to obey any
+call that may be made for their services.
+
+Before such a requisition is made, the municipal authorities, or any
+number of benevolent individuals who may choose to subscribe, must have
+provided a house and school-room, with all proper accommodations, and
+must certify that a certain number of pupils are willing to enrol
+themselves. On application to the central establishment three qualified
+Christian Brothers are sent down, at salaries not exceeding six hundred
+francs, or twenty-four pounds per annum in the provinces, or thirty
+pounds a year in Paris. Fewer than three Frères are not allowed to
+superintend each school; two for the classes, and a probationer to
+perform the household duties; but, when the schools outgrow the
+management of that number a fourth is added, to take the management of
+the whole, and is called a _Frère-directeur_. The classes are limited to
+sixty for writing, and one hundred for other branches of education. This
+limitation is necessary, because the monitorial system is not followed,
+and the whole weight of the duties falls on the masters.
+
+The schools thus established in the various quarters of Paris are very
+numerous; six thousand apprentices and artisans attend them after their
+hours of work—young boys, youths, and adults—the numbers having declined
+since the revolution of 1848. “I have,” says Mr. Seymour Tremenheere, in
+a note to his Report on the state of the mining population, “at
+different times visited some of those evening schools in the Fauxbourgs
+St. Antoine and St. Martin, containing from four hundred to six hundred,
+in separate class-rooms of sixty to a hundred each, all well lighted,
+warmed, and ventilated. The gentle and affectionate manner of the
+Frères, and their skill in teaching, were very conspicuous, and
+sufficiently explained their success. The instruction consists, in
+addition to the doctrines of Christianity, which are the basis of the
+whole, of reading, writing, arithmetic, a little history, drawing
+(linear and perspective), and vocal music. In all the classes, many
+adults who had been at work all day were to be seen mixed with young men
+and boys, patiently learning to read, or to write and cypher. In the
+drawing-classes, some were copying ornamental designs, or heads, for
+their own amusement; others, to improve themselves as cabinetmakers, or
+workers in bronze, or in other trades for which some cultivation of
+taste is requisite.”
+
+The superiority of the system of teaching adopted by the Christian
+Brothers has been proved by a severe test. In Paris, as in London, it is
+the custom, once a year, to assemble all the parochial schools; not,
+however, as a mere show for the purpose of uniting in ill-executed
+psalmody, but with the better and more useful view of testing the
+improvement of the scholars, and of ascertaining the degrees of
+diligence and proficiency attained by the masters. The parochial
+scholars compete for prizes, given by the corporation of the city; not
+only among themselves, but with the other elementary schools—those of
+the Christian Brothers among the rest. At these competitions, it has
+happened, of late years, that the pupils of the latter have been the
+victors. In one year, they gained seventeen prizes out of twenty; in
+another, twenty-three out of thirty-one; and, last year, they carried
+off the highest forty-two prizes: the fortunate candidates of all the
+other schools only claiming the inferior rewards. In addition to these
+evening schools for adults and young men who are already gaining their
+livelihood, the Frères Chrétiens have set on foot Sunday evening sermons
+at different churches, and also meetings for lectures on religious and
+moral subjects adapted to the wants of, and calculated to influence, the
+same class. “I recently was present at one of these meetings in the
+Faubourg St. Antoine” (we quote our former authority), “where a series
+of eloquent and forcible addresses was delivered—one, by a Professor of
+History, on some of the leading points of Christian morals; another, by
+a gentleman of literary attainments, on Death and a future state; a
+third, by a gentleman of independent position, on the religious
+condition of some of the forçats at Toulon; a fourth, by a member of the
+university, on the displacement of labour by machinery, and its ultimate
+advantage to the labourer; all of whom had come forward to aid in the
+task of combating irreligion, and the various forms of error pervading
+the minds of so many of the working classes of Paris. These were
+followed by hymns, and by prayers. A deep sense of religion is, indeed,
+the animating spirit of all the endeavours of the Frères Chrétiens for
+the benefit of the lower classes, and the principle which sustains them
+in their self-denying and arduous career.”
+
+The lovers of “great comprehensive systems,”—to whom we adverted in a
+former page—might, by copying the plan of the French Christian Brothers,
+carry out a scheme which would be of the utmost use in this country. It
+would also have the advantage of encouraging small beginnings, and
+combining them into one great and efficacious whole. We can hardly wait
+until the present adult generation of ignorance shall die out to be
+succeeded by another which we are, after all, only half educating. Why
+not offer inducements, and form plans, for the instruction of grown-up
+persons, many of whom, having come to a sense of their deficiencies,
+pine for culture and enlightenment, which they cannot obtain? A central
+establishment in London—on a general plan somewhat similar to the
+Government Normal Schools already in existence, but with less cumbrous
+and costly machinery—could be formed at a small expense; and we doubt
+not that many a knot of benevolent well-wishers would, in their various
+localities, be eager to provide all the scholastic _matériel_ for the
+less favoured artisans and day-workers around them, could they look with
+confidence to some central establishment for the formation of teachers,
+in which they could place implicit confidence.
+
+The monitorial system, in a school consisting of all ages—in which a
+small boy, from his intellectual superiority, might be placed over the
+heads of pupils, greater, older than himself—is manifestly
+impracticable; and a larger number of teachers than is usual in schools
+for children only, would be necessary.
+
+We will borrow from Mr. Tremenheere a comparison between the
+intellectual acquirements and moral conduct of French workmen and those
+of English workmen, in the mining districts of each country. We do not
+assume that the superiority of the French workmen has been occasioned
+solely by the evening schools of the Christian Brothers, but, after what
+we have already shown, we consider it reasonable to infer that, since
+1830, those establishments have had a large share in the formation of
+their character. In a former report,[6] Mr. Tremenheere described the
+habits and manners of the French colliers and miners, especially those
+at the iron and coal-works in the coalfield near Valenciennes. He was
+compelled, by the force of unexceptionable evidence, to show how
+superior they were in every respect, except that of mere animal power,
+to the generality of the mining population in this country. At the large
+iron-works at Denain, employing about four thousand people, there were
+thirty Englishmen from Staffordshire. These men were earning about
+one-third more wages than the French labourers; but, they spent all they
+earned in eating and drinking; were frequently drunk; and in their
+manners were coarse, quarrelsome, disrespectful, and insubordinate. The
+English manager—who had held for many years responsible situations under
+some of the leading iron-masters in Staffordshire—stated with regret,
+that so different and so superior were the intelligence, and the
+civilised habits and conduct, of the French, that, if any thirty
+Frenchmen from these works were to go to work in Staffordshire, “they
+would be so disgusted, they would not stay; they would think they had
+got among a savage race.”
+
+Footnote 6:
+
+  “Report of Inspection of French and Belgian mines, 1848—Appendix.”
+
+There have been, lately, forty Frenchmen employed at one of the large
+manufactories in Staffordshire, by the Messrs. Chance, at their
+extensive and well-known glass-works at West Bromwich, in the immediate
+neighbourhood of some of the great iron-works. Mr. Chance gives the
+Commissioner the following account of these men:—“A few years ago, we
+brought over forty Frenchmen to teach our men a particular process in
+our manufacture. They have now nearly all returned. We found them very
+steady, quiet, temperate men. They earned good wages, and saved while
+they were with us a good deal of money. We have had as much as fifteen
+hundred pounds at a time in our hands belonging to these men, which we
+transmitted to France for them. One of them, who sometimes earns as much
+as seven pounds a week, has saved in our service not much short of four
+thousand pounds. He is with us now. He is a glass-blower. We have about
+fourteen hundred men in our employ (in the glass-blowing and alkali
+works) when trade is in a good state. I am sorry to say that the
+contrast between them and the Frenchmen was very marked in many
+respects, especially in that of forethought and economy. I do not think
+that, while we had in our hands the large sum mentioned above as the
+savings of the Frenchmen at one time, we have had at the same time five
+pounds belonging to our own people. They generally spend their money as
+fast as they can get it.”
+
+In Scotland, evening schools abound, and come in effectually to aid the
+universal system of primary instruction existing over that part of our
+island. A Wesleyan local preacher told Mr. Tremenheere of the Scotchmen
+employed on the Northumberland and Durham collieries, “when you go into
+some of the Scotchmen’s houses, you would be surprised to see the books
+they have—not many, but all choice books. Some of their favourite
+authors in divinity are very common among them. Many of them read such
+books as Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and are fond of discussing the
+subjects he treats of. They also read the lives of statesmen, and books
+of history; also works on logic; and, sometimes, mathematics. Such men
+can be reasoned with about anything appertaining to their calling, and
+they know very well why wages cannot be at particular times higher than
+a certain standard. They see at once, by the price current in the
+market, what is the fair portion to go to the workman as wages,
+according to the circumstances of the pit and the general state of the
+trade. Such men will have nothing to do with the union. They scorn to
+read such penny and twopenny publications as we have been talking about.
+They are fonder of sitting down after their work and reading a chapter
+of the Wealth of Nations. They will also talk with great zest of many of
+their great men—their own countrymen, who have raised themselves by
+their own industry. There are, undoubtedly, some men that come out of
+Scotland bad men, but these are not informed men. I am speaking of all
+this neighbourhood, where I have lived all my life. There are a great
+many Scotch at all the collieries here, and most of them very
+respectable men, exceedingly so. You may ask me why the union is so
+strong in parts of Scotland—as in Lanarkshire? It is because in
+Lanarkshire the pitmen are one-third Irish, and many of the worst Scotch
+from other counties. Those who come here are among the best in their own
+country, I should think, from the accounts they give me. When a
+Scotchman comes here he earns English wages; but he does not spend them
+as an Englishman does. A Scotchman often, rather than lose buying a good
+book, will lose his dinner. The Scotchwomen begin to keep their houses
+cleaner after they get into England, and by degrees they come to keep
+them as clean as the Englishwomen; and the first generation after their
+fathers come are equal to the English in their wish to keep everything
+clean about them. They are generally very saving, and lay out the
+over-plus of their earnings in books and furniture or lay it by. They
+have a great disposition to have their children well taught. Indeed, I
+have seen several lads that have been educated in the Scotch schools,
+and I find them very well taught; they can reason like men.
+
+“I don’t think I ever saw Adam Smith’s works in more than one or two
+English pit-men’s houses. They are backward to attempt anything that
+requires steady thinking, such as that book, or any work on logic or
+mathematics. The Scotch often study both. This makes one of the great
+differences between the best working-men of the two people. The English
+seldom attempt even English grammar or geometry; they always tell me
+they are obliged to give way when they have made a trial.[7] They had
+rather read any popular work, such as the ‘Christian Philosopher,’ the
+‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ or Walter Scott’s novels. They love to read their
+country’s history, and they like to talk of its renown in the ancient
+French wars of Edward the Third and Henry the Fifth. They are also great
+readers of Napoleon’s and the Duke of Wellington’s wars, and their soul
+seems to take fire when they talk of their country’s victories. They are
+fond of biography, and especially that of men who rose from being poor
+men to be great characters. They are very generous in their
+dispositions, and will share their loaf with the poor, as all the
+beggars and trampers from Newcastle and all the country know. They are
+greatly improved in my time as to drinking habits; there is much less of
+it, and their money is chiefly spent in living well and making a great
+show in furniture and dress. The women, too, are improving, and manage
+their families much better than they used to do. The English pit-boys
+are exceedingly quick at school—much more so than the Scotch, I think.
+What I most want to see is better descriptions of schools—schools under
+masters of ability, who can teach their boys to think and reason. You
+will find boys who have been at such schools as most of those we have
+now, that can write a good hand and do some cyphering; but when you come
+to ask them questions that exercise the mind, they have no idea what to
+answer. If there were such schools for the boys, the men would soon be a
+different race; for what the men want is to be taught to exercise their
+reason fairly, which would prevent their being led away as they are
+now.”
+
+Footnote 7:
+
+  We doubt the _general_ applicability of this description, without
+  questioning its correctness in this case.
+
+With a little modification, this description of the pitman applies, in
+its more favourable characteristics, to the English operative generally.
+No one can read it without being convinced that there is sound and
+hopeful material, in the generous English character to work upon. The
+natural ability, the deep feeling, the quickness of perception, the
+susceptibility to religious and moral impressions, the sound common
+sense where the rudest cultivation has been attained, and the heartfelt
+patriotism, of the humble orders of this country, are unequalled in the
+world. Surely this is a rich mine to work; surely it should not be left
+to unskilled workers, or to chance; but should be faithfully confided to
+the heads and hearts of men, trained up to its improvement, as to a
+noble calling, and a solemn duty! In all parts of this land, the people
+are willing and desirous to be taught. Open schools anywhere, and they
+will come—even, as the Ragged Schools have proved, out of the worst dens
+of vice and infamy, in the worst hiding-places, in the worst towns and
+cities. But, unless the art of teaching is pursued upon a system, as an
+art, thoroughly understood, and proceeding on sound principles, the best
+intentions and the most sincere devotion can do next to nothing. For
+want of competent teachers, there are opportunities being lost at this
+moment, we do not hesitate to say, in the Ragged Schools of London
+alone, the waste of which, is of more true importance to the community,
+than all the theological controversies that ever deafened its ears, and
+distracted its wits. Meanwhile, the sands of Time are running out
+remorselessly, and, with every grain, immortal souls are perishing. We
+want teachers, competent to educate the mind, to rouse the reason, to
+undo the beastly transformation that has been effected—to our guilt and
+shame—upon humanity, and to bring God’s image out of the condition of
+the lower animals. What we have suffered to be beaten out of shape, we
+must remould, with pains, and care, and skill, and cannot hope to put
+into its rightful form hap-hazard. And such would be the glorious office
+and main usefulness of a comprehensive, unsectarian—in short,
+Christian—Brotherhood in England.
+
+
+
+
+                           AN EVERY DAY HERO.
+
+
+        “Tell us,” the children to their grandsire said,
+        “Some wondrous story! tell us of the wars,
+        Or one of those old ballads that you know
+        About the seven famous champions,
+        St. George, St. Denis, and the rest of them.
+        We have delight in those heroic stories,
+        And often tell them over to ourselves
+        And wish that there were heroes now-a-days.”
+          The old man smoked his pipe; the children urged
+        More eagerly their wish, athirst to know
+        Something about the great men of old times,
+        Deploring still that these degenerate days
+        Produced no heroes, and that now no poets
+        Made ballads that were worth the listening to.
+          The old man smiled and laid aside his pipe;
+        Then, gazing tenderly into their faces,
+        Said he would tell them of as great a hero
+        As any which the ballads chronicled—
+        The good old ballads which they loved so well.
+        “Once on a time,” said he, “there was a lad,
+        Whose name was John; his father was a gardener.
+        He had great skill in flowers even when a child;
+        And when his father died, he carried on
+        The gardener’s trade. One autumn night he found
+        A young man hiding in his garden-shed,
+        Haggard and foot-sore, wanting bread to eat;
+        A fugitive who had escaped the law,
+        And being now discovered, prayed for mercy,
+        And told his tale so very touchingly
+        That the young gardener promised him a refuge,
+        And strictest secresy. For weeks and months
+        The stranger worked with him, receiving wages
+        As a hired labourer. Both were fine young men,
+        Well-grown, broad-chested, full of strength and mettle;
+        In outward seeming equal to each other,
+        But inwardly the two were different.
+          “The stranger, George, had not a gardening turn,
+        He was book-learned, and had a gift for figures,
+        And could talk well, which in itself was good;
+        But he was double-faced, and false as Judas,
+        Who did betray the Saviour with a kiss.
+        He had, in truth, been clerk to some great merchant,
+        Had wronged his trusting master, and had fled,
+        As I have said, from the pursuit of law.
+        Of this, however, John knew not a word,
+        Knew only that he had been in sore trouble,
+        And, for that cause, he strove to do him good;
+        And when he found him useless in his trade,
+        He introduced him to the Squire’s bailiff,
+        Whose daughter he had courted many a year.
+        This bailiff was a simple, honest man,
+        Who not designing evil, none suspected.
+        He found the stranger, clever, quick at reckoning,
+        Smart with his pen; a likely man of business;
+        And, therefore, on a luckless day for him,
+        Brought him before the Squire. Ere long he had
+        A place appointed him which gave him access
+        To the Squire daily; principles of honour
+        Were all unknown to him: all means allowable
+        Which served his ends. He gained a great ascendance
+        Over the Squire, and ere four years were passed,
+        He was appointed bailiff.
+                                          “The old bailiff
+        Was sent adrift, and the kind, worthy, Squire,
+        His thirty years’ employer, turned against him!
+        It was a villain’s act, first, to traduce,
+        And then supplant—it was a Judas-trick!
+        The gardener John, who wooed the bailiff’s daughter,
+        Had married her before this plotter’s work
+        Was come to light; and they, poor, simple folk,
+        Invited him among their wedding-company,
+        And he, with his black plots hatching within him,
+        Came, full of smiles, and ate and drank with them;
+        The double-faced villain! The old bailiff
+        Was turned adrift, as I have said already,
+        And his dismissal looked like a disgrace,
+        Although the Squire brought not a charge against him,
+        Except that he was old, and younger men
+        Could better carry out his modern plans!
+        And modern plans, God knows, they had enough!
+        Old tenants were removed; and soon a notice
+        Came to the gardener, John, that he must quit;
+        Must quit the little spot he loved so well,
+        And where the poor, heart-broken bailiff, found
+        A home in his distress. It mattered not
+        Their likings or convenience, go they must;
+        The Squire was laying out his place afresh—
+        Or the new bailiff, rather; and John’s garden
+        Was wanted for the fine new pleasure-grounds!
+          “The man of work—the man who toils to live,
+        Must still be up and doing; ’tis his privilege
+        That he has little time to wring his hands,
+        And hang his head because his fate is cruel.
+        John was a man of action, so, to London
+        Came he, and, ere a twelvemonth had gone round,
+        Had taken service as a city fireman.
+        It was an arduous life; a different life
+        To that of gardening, of rearing pinks,
+        Budding the dainty rose, and giving heed
+        To the unclosing of the tulip’s leaf.
+        But he was one of those who fear not hardship;
+        And when he saw his little fortunes wrecked
+        By the smooth villain whom he had befriended,
+        He left his native place with wife and children,
+        Mostly because it galled his soul to meet
+        The man who had so much abused his goodness,
+        And, in the wide and busy world of London,
+        Where, as ’tis said, is room for every man,
+        He came to try his luck. He was strong-limbed,
+        Active and agile as a mountain goat,
+        Fearless of danger, hardy, brave, and full
+        Of pity as is every noble nature.
+          “He was the boldest of the London firemen.
+        Clothed in his iron mail like an old warrior,
+        He rushed on danger, his true heart his shield;
+        Fear he had none whene’er his duty called.
+        Oft clomb he to the roofs of burning houses;
+        Sprang here and there, and bore off human creatures,
+        Frantic with terror, or with terror dumb,
+        Saving their lives at peril of his own.
+        Such men as these are heroes!
+                                          “One dark night,
+        A stormy winter’s night, a fire broke out
+        Somewhere by Rotherhithe—a dreadful fire—
+        In midst of narrow streets where the tall houses
+        Were habited by poor and squalid wretches,
+        Together packed like sheep within their pens,
+        And who, unlike the rich, had nought to offer
+        For their lives’ rescue. Here the fire broke out,
+        And raged with fury; here the fireman, John,
+        ‘Mid falling roofs, on dizzy walls aloft,
+        Through raging flames, and black, confounding smoke,
+        And noise and tumult as of hell broke loose,
+        Rushed on, and ever saved some sinking wretch.
+        Many had thus been saved by his one arm,
+        When some one said, that in a certain chamber,
+        High up amid the burning roofs, still lay
+        A sick man and his child, who, yesternight,
+        Had hither come as strangers. They were left,
+        By all forgotten, and must perish there.
+        Whilst yet they spoke, upon a roof’s high ridge,
+        Amid the eddying smoke and growing flame,
+        The miserable man was seen to stand,
+        Stretching his arms for aid in frantic terror.
+          “Without a moment’s pause, amid the fire,
+        Six stories high, sprang John, who caught the word
+        That still a human being had been left.
+        Quick as a thought o’er red-hot floors he leapt,
+        Through what seemed gulfs of fire, on to the roof
+        Where stood the frantic man. The crowds below
+        Looked on and scarcely breathed. They saw him reach
+        The yet unperished roof-tree—saw him pause—
+        Saw the two men start back, as from each other.
+        They raised a cry to urge him on. They knew not
+        That here he met his former enemy—
+        The man who had returned him evil for good!
+        And who had lost his place for breach of trust
+        Some twelvemonths past, and now had come to want.
+          “The flames approached the roof. A cry burst forth
+        Again from the great crowd, and women fainted.
+        And what did John, think you—this city fireman?
+        —He looked upon the abject wretch before him,
+        Who fell into a swoon at sight of him,
+        So sensitive is even an evil conscience,
+        And, speaking not a word, lifted him up
+        And bore him safely down into the street—
+        Then shook him from him like a noisome thing!
+          “Anon the man revived, and with quick terror
+        Asked for his child—his little four years’ son—
+        But he had been forgotten—still was left
+        Within the house to perish. Who would save him!
+        Grovelling before his feet the father lay,
+        Of all forgetful but of his dear child,
+        And prayed the injured man who had saved his life
+        To save the boy! ‘Why spake ye not of him?
+        He was more worthy saving of the two!’
+        Said John, abrupt and brief—and straight was gone.
+        Once more he scaled the roof. The crowd was hushed
+        Into deep silence: it had but one heart,
+        Had but one breath, intense anxiety
+        For that brave man who put again his life
+        In such dire jeopardy. None spoke,
+        But many a prayer was breathed. Along the roof
+        Anon they saw him hurrying with the child.
+        The red flames met him, hemmed him round about!
+        Escape was not! The women sobbed and moaned
+        Down in the crowd below; men gazed and trembled,
+        And wild suggestions ran throughout the mass
+        Of how he might be saved. But all were vain,
+        Help was there none! Amid the roaring flames
+        His voice was heard; he spake, they knew not what;
+        They hurried to and fro; the engines drenched
+        The burning pile. He made another sign!
+        Oh, God! could they but know what was his wish!
+        —They knew it not! The fierce flame mastered all—
+        The roof fell in—the child—the man was lost!”
+          The grandsire paused a moment, then went on;
+        “Yes, in our common life of every day
+        There are true heroes, truer, many a one,
+        Than they whose deeds are blazoned forth on brass!
+        —Now leave me to myself; give me my pipe—
+        You’ve had your will; I’ve told you of a hero,
+        One of God’s making—and he was, your own father!”
+
+
+
+
+              THE LIFE AND LABOURS OF LIEUTENANT WAGHORN.
+
+
+The great benefactors of our species may be divided into two grand
+classes—the men of thought, and the men of action; the men whose genius
+was chiefly in the realm of mind, and those whose power lies in tangible
+things. Let no one set up the idle and invidious comparison as to which
+of the two is the nobler, since both are equally needful to the world’s
+progress; all great thoughts and theories, dreams and visions (let us
+never fear the truth, but honor it even in using terms of vulgar and
+shortsighted opprobrium) of men of genius and knowledge, being the germ
+and origin of great actions,—and all great actions being the practical
+working out of the former, without which no good to mankind at large can
+be accomplished. To set thought and action, therefore, in opposition to
+each other, is like setting the arms and legs of Hercules to quarrel
+with his head while performing his labours. Nor can the distinction,
+thus broadly stated, be drawn at all times with any definite precision,
+since the man who conceives and developes a new principle, is sometimes
+able to carry it out himself. This combination of powers in the same
+individual is very rare, and is obviously one reason why, in most cases,
+the originator of a new thing is neglected as a visionary, and a madman.
+But the energy of thought to conceive and design displayed by Lieutenant
+Waghorn, was more than equalled by the energy of character and action
+required to carry out his stupendous plans. Sometimes with the best
+assistance—sometimes with none—sometimes in defiance of contest,
+opprobrium, and opposition—the vigour of mind and body of this man
+caused him to undertake and to succeed in projects which are among the
+most prominent of those which especially characterise the genius of the
+present age.
+
+We have intimated that Mr. Waghorn was both a man of thought and action,
+but this must be understood with certain marked limitations. Mr.
+Waghorn’s mind was of that peculiar construction, which appears never to
+think earnestly except with a view to action. Even that quality, which
+in other men is of the most ideal kind, and commonly exerts itself in
+matters of little or no substantiality of fact and purpose, with him
+partook of the physicality of his strong nature as much as the admixture
+was possible,—so that he may be said to have had a practical
+imagination. His objects and designs were welded into all the materials
+of his understanding and knowledge; his ambitions and hopes were fused
+with the generation of the mighty steam-forces that were to drive his
+ships across the ocean and inland seas; the elasticity of his spirit was
+identified with the flying speed of Arab horses, and dromedaries
+carrying the “mail” across the desert; and when he projected a wonderful
+shortening of time and space, he at the same moment beheld the broad
+massive arm of England stretched across to govern and make use of her
+enormous Indian territories, comprising a hundred million of souls. He
+never thought of himself; he was too much engaged with the vastness of
+his designs for his country. We shall see how that country rewarded his
+efforts.
+
+Thomas Waghorn was born at Chatham, in 1800. At twelve years of age he
+became a midshipman in Her Majesty’s Navy; and before he had reached
+seventeen, passed in “navigation” for Lieutenant, being the youngest
+midshipman that had ever done so—the examination requiring a great
+amount of both theoretical and practical knowledge, and being always
+conducted with severity. This made him eligible to the rank of
+lieutenant, but did not include it. At the close of the year 1817, he
+was paid off, and went as third mate of a Free-trader to Calcutta. He
+returned home, and, in 1819, obtained an appointment in the Bengal
+Marine (Pilot-Service) of India, where he served till 1824. At the
+request of the Bengal Government, he now volunteered for the Arracan
+War, and received the command of the Honourable East India Company’s
+cutter, Matchless, together with a division of gun-boats, and repaired
+to the scene of action in Arracan, with the south-eastern division of
+that army and flotilla. He was five times in action, saw much rough work
+by land and by sea, and escaped with only one wound in the right thigh.
+He remained two years and a half in this service, and after having
+received the thanks of all the authorities in that province, he returned
+to Calcutta in 1827, with a constitution already undermined from the
+baneful fever of Arracan, where so many thousands had died.
+
+Weakened as he had been, Mr. Waghorn nevertheless rallied to the great
+project he had secretly at heart, namely, “A steam communication between
+our Eastern possessions and their mother-country, England.” Even before
+his departure from Calcutta on furlough, in 1827, ill in health, and
+only imperfectly recovered from the Arracan fever, still, between its
+attacks, his energies returned. He communicated his plan to the
+officials, namely, the Marine Board at Calcutta, who forthwith advanced
+it to the notice of the then Chief Secretary to the Bengal Government,
+the present Mr. Charles Lushington, M.P. for Westminster; through whom
+he obtained letters of credence from Lord Combermere, then acting as
+Vice-President in Council (Earl Amherst, Governor-General, being on a
+tour in Upper India), to the Honourable Court of Directors of the East
+India Company in London, recommending him, in consequence of his
+meritorious conduct in the Arracan War, “as a fit and proper person to
+open Steam Navigation with India, _viâ_ the Cape of Good Hope.”
+
+On his homeward voyage, Mr. Waghorn advocated this great object publicly
+by every means in his power (the numerous attestations of which lie open
+before us) at Madras, the Mauritius, the Cape, and St. Helena. Directly
+he arrived in England, he set about the same thing, and advocated the
+project at all points, particularly in London, Liverpool, Manchester,
+Glasgow, Birmingham. But the Post Office, at that time, was opposed to
+ocean steam-navigation; and so, unfortunately, were the East India
+Directors,—with the single exception of Mr. Loch. Two whole years were
+thus passed in fruitless efforts to make great men open their eyes. At
+length, in October, 1829, Mr. Waghorn was summoned by Lord Ellenborough,
+the then Chairman of the Court of Directors, to go to India, through
+Egypt, with despatches for Sir John Malcolm, Governor of Bombay, &c.,
+and more especially, to report upon the practicability of the Red Sea
+Navigation for the Overland Route.
+
+On the 28th of October, having had only four days’ previous notice from
+the India House, Waghorn started on the top of the Eagle stage-coach
+from the Spread Eagle, Gracechurch Street. All his luggage weighed about
+twenty pounds. The East India Company’s steam-vessel Enterprise was
+expected to be at Suez, in the Red Sea, from India, on or about the 8th
+of December. It was much desired that despatches from England should
+reach her at this place, which Mr. Waghorn undertook they should do. He
+could not speak French nor Italian, both of which would have been very
+advantageous; but he had some knowledge of Hindostanee, and a little
+Arabic.
+
+On this “trip,” as Waghorn calls it, so extraordinarily rapid was the
+first part of his journey, _viz._ to Trieste (accomplished in nine days
+and a half, through five kingdoms) that an enquiry was instituted by the
+Foreign Office respecting it; for at this time our Post Office Letters
+occupied fourteen days in reaching that place. Yet Waghorn had been
+obliged to travel upwards of one hundred and thirty miles out of his
+direct way, in consequence of broken bridges, falling avalanches, and
+the disabling of a steamer.
+
+Instantly enquiring for the quickest means of getting on to Alexandria,
+he was informed that an Austrian brig had sailed only the evening
+before, and having had calms and light airs all night, she was still in
+sight from the tops of the hills. Away he dashed in a fresh posting
+carriage, because if he could reach Pesano, through Capo D’Istria,
+twenty miles down the eastern side of the Gulf of Venice, before the
+Austrian vessel had passed, he might embark from this port as passenger
+for Alexandria. On reaching Pesano, he could still distinguish the
+vessel, and he accordingly strove to increase the rapidity of his chase
+to the utmost. He got within three miles of the vessel. At this juncture
+a strong northerly wind sprang up, and carrying her forward on her
+course, she was presently lost to sight. Exhausted in body, and
+“racked,” as he says, by disappointment after the previous excitement,
+he returned to Trieste.
+
+Ascertaining that the next opportunity of getting to Alexandria would be
+by a Spanish ship, which was now taking in her cargo in the quarantine
+ground, he instantly hastened there. The captain informed him that he
+could not possibly sail in less than three days, and required one
+hundred dollars for the passage. Waghorn directly offered him one
+hundred and fifty dollars if he would sail in eight-and-forty hours.
+Whereupon the captain found that it _was_ just possible to do so; and he
+kept his word.
+
+  “After a tedious passage of sixteen days,” says Waghorn, to whom every
+  hour that did not fly was no doubt tedious, “I arrived at Alexandria,
+  but hearing that Mr. Barker, who held the combined offices of Consul
+  General in Egypt, and agent to the Honourable East India Company, was
+  at his country-house at Rosetta, I hired donkeys, and was on my way
+  for it after five hours’ stay at Alexandria.”
+
+One ludicrous characteristic of the Alexandrian donkeys is worth
+recording. Never in future can we regard the epithet of “an ass,” as
+being properly synonymous with stupidity. The creatures ambled and
+trotted along very well during the first day; but on the subsequent
+morning, when they clearly perceived that a long journey was before
+them, they fell down intentionally four or five times, with all the
+signs of fatigue and weakness. The drivers informed him that it was a
+common practice of the donkeys.
+
+Embarking on the Nile, our traveller made it his business to navigate
+the boat himself, in order to take soundings, and to obtain as much
+knowledge as would promote both the immediate and future objects of his
+journey.
+
+Mr. Waghorn rested at Rosetta, to recover from his fatigue, and then set
+out for Cairo on a _cangé_, a sort of boat of fifteen tons’ burthen,
+with two large latteen-sails. The _rais_, or captain, agreed to land him
+at Cairo in three days and four nights, or receive nothing. This he
+failed to do, in consequence of the boat grounding on the shoal of
+Shallakan. Waghorn’s notions of a reason for fatigue, may be curiously
+gathered from a remark he makes incidentally on this occasion. “The
+crew,” says he, “were _almost_ fatigued: we have been continually
+tacking for _five_ days and nights.” Being out of all patience, he left
+the boat, and again mounting donkeys, proceeded with his servant to
+Cairo. He left his luggage behind him, merely taking his despatches.
+
+Having obtained camels, and a requisite passport from the Pasha,
+Mohammed Ali, to guarantee his safe passage across the Desert of Suez;
+Mr. Waghorn left Cairo on the 5th of December for Suez, and at sunset
+had pitched his tent on the Desert at six miles distance.
+
+At dawn of day, he was again on his journey, and managed to travel
+thirty-four miles beneath the burning sun before he halted. The next day
+he journeyed thirty miles, and in the evening pitched his tent only four
+miles short of Suez. The next day, he reached the appointed place, and
+there rested, the Enterprise not having yet arrived.
+
+While waiting with the greatest impatience the arrival of this steamer,
+Mr. Waghorn appears to have endeavoured to calm himself by jotting down
+a few observations on the Desert he had just crossed. These
+observations, slight and few as they are, must be “made much of,” as
+they are, of all things, the rarest with him. He always saw the _end_
+before him, and nearly all his observations were confined to the means
+of attaining it.
+
+  “The Desert of Suez, commencing from Cairo, a gentle ascent, about
+  thirty-five miles on the way; then, the same gradual descent till you
+  arrive at the plains of Suez. The soil of the first five miles from
+  Cairo is fine sand; then, coarse sand, inclinable to gravel. Within
+  twelve miles of Suez” (notice—he is tired already of description, and
+  brings you within twelve miles of the place) “you meet many sand-hills
+  between, till you arrive at the plains before mentioned, which form a
+  perfect level for miles in extent, leading you to the gates of Suez.
+
+  “The antelopes I observed in parties of about a dozen each, and the
+  camel-drivers informed me that they creep under the shrubs about
+  eighteen inches high, to catch the drops of dew, which is the only
+  means they have of relieving their thirst. I saw partridges in covies
+  of from six to seven, but nowhere on the wing: they were running about
+  the Desert, and I was informed they were not eaten even by the Arabs.”
+
+Considering the food they pick up in the Desert, perhaps this is no
+wonder.
+
+Having informed us that camels are to be had very cheaply at Suez—say a
+dollar each camel for fifty miles’ distance—and that the water is very
+brackish, he suddenly adds, with characteristic brevity, “To save
+recapitulation in _describing_ Cossier, it is the same as Suez, _viz._,
+camels are to be had in abundance at a trifling expense, and the water
+is as bad.”
+
+He remained at Suez two days, waiting with feverish anxiety the expected
+arrival of the Enterprise. She still did not appear—a strong N.W. wind
+blowing directly down the sea. Being quite unable to endure the suspense
+any longer, he determined to embark on the Red Sea in an open boat,
+intending to sail down its centre, in hopes of meeting her between Suez
+and Cossier.
+
+All the seamen of the locality vigorously remonstrated with Mr. Waghorn
+against this attempt, and he well knew that the nautical authorities,
+both of the East India House and the British Government, were of opinion
+that the Red Sea was not navigable. But he had important Government
+despatches to deliver—had pledged himself to deliver them on board the
+Enterprise, and considering that his course of duty, as well as his
+reputation as a traveller, were at stake, he persisted in his
+determination. Accordingly, he embarked in an open boat, and without
+having any personal knowledge of the navigation of this sea, without
+chart, without compass, or even the encouragement of a single precedent
+for such an enterprise—his only guide the sun by day, and the North star
+by night—he sailed down the centre of the Red Sea.
+
+Of this most interesting and unprecedented voyage, the narrative of
+which everybody would have read with such avidity, Mr. Waghorn gives no
+detailed account. He disappoints you of all the circumstances. All
+intermediate things are abruptly cut off with these very characteristic
+words:—“_Suffice it_ to say, _I arrived_ at Juddah, 620 miles, in six
+and a half days, in that boat!” You get nothing more than the sum total.
+He kept a sailor’s log-journal; but it is only meant for sailors to
+read, though now and then you obtain a glimpse of the sort of work he
+went through. Thus:—“_Sunday_, 13th, strong N.W. wind, half a gale, but
+scudding under storm-sail. Sunset, anchored for the night. Jaffateen
+islands out of sight to the N. Lost two anchors during the night,” &c.
+The rest is equally nautical and technical. In one of the many scattered
+papers collected since the death of Mr. Waghorn, we find a very slight
+passing allusion to toils, perils, and privations, which, however, he
+calmly says, were “inseparable from such a voyage under such
+circumstances,”—but not one touch of description from first to last.
+
+A more extraordinary instance of great practical experience and
+knowledge, resolutely and fully carrying out a project which must of
+necessity have appeared little short of madness to almost everybody
+else, was never recorded. He was perfectly successful, so far as the
+navigation was concerned, and in the course he adopted, notwithstanding
+that his crew of six Arabs mutinied. It appears (for he tells us only
+the bare fact) they were only subdued on the principle known to
+philosophers in theory, and to high-couraged men, accustomed to command,
+by experience, _viz._, that the one man who is braver, stronger, and
+firmer than any individual of ten or twenty men, is more than a match
+for the ten or twenty put together. He touched at Cossier on the 14th,
+not having fallen in with the Enterprise. There he was told by the
+Governor that the steamer was expected every hour. Mr. Waghorn was in no
+state of mind to wait very long; so, finding she did not arrive, he
+again put to sea in his open boat, resolved, if he did not fall in with
+her, to proceed the entire distance to Juddah—a distance of four hundred
+miles further. Of this further voyage he does not leave any record, even
+in his log, beyond the simple declaration that he “embarked for
+Juddah—ran the distance in three days and twenty-one hours and a
+quarter—and on the 23rd anchored his boat close to one of the East India
+Company’s cruisers, the Benares.”
+
+But, now comes the most trying part of his whole undertaking—the part
+which a man of his vigorously constituted impulses was least able to
+bear as the climax of his prolonged and arduous efforts, privations,
+anxieties, and fatigue. Repairing on board the Benares, to learn the
+news, the captain informed him, that in consequence of being found in a
+defective state on her arrival at Bombay, “the Enterprise was not coming
+at all.” This intelligence seems to have felled him like a blow, and he
+was immediately seized with a delirious fever. The captain and officers
+of the Benares felt great sympathy and interest in this sad result of so
+many extraordinary efforts, and detaining him on board, bestowed every
+attention on his malady.
+
+“Thus baffled,” writes Mr. Waghorn, “I was six weeks before I could
+proceed onward to Bombay by sailing vessel.” On arriving at Bombay with
+his despatches, the thanks of the Government in Council, &c., were voted
+to him, “for having, when disappointed of a steamer, proceeded with
+these despatches in an open boat, down the Red Sea, &c.” There was
+evidently much more said of a complimentary kind, but Waghorn cuts all
+short with the _et cætera_.
+
+He reached Bombay on the 21st of March, having thus accomplished his
+journey from London in four months and twenty-one days—an extraordinary
+rapidity at this date, 1830. Of course, the time he was detained in
+Cairo, Suez, Cossier, and Juddah (where he lay ill with the fever six
+weeks), ought to be deducted, because he would have saved all this time,
+fever inclusive, if he had not expected the Enterprise from India.
+
+He now turned his attention to a series of fresh exhortations to large
+public meetings which he convened at different places—Calcutta, Madras,
+the Isle of France, the Cape of Good Hope, St. Helena, &c., on the
+subject of shortening the route from England to India, and greatly
+lessening the time. He described the various points of the new route he
+proposed, and also the new kind of steam-vessel which it was advisable
+to have built and fitted up, for the sole purpose of a rapid
+transmission of the mail. In an “Address to His Majesty’s Ministers and
+the Honourable East India Company,” which we find among his papers,
+there occurs the following passage—simple in expression, noble in its
+quiet modesty, but pregnant with enormous results to his country, all of
+which have already, in a great degree, been accomplished.
+
+  “Of myself I trust I may be excused when I say that the highest object
+  of my ambition has ever been an extensive usefulness; and my line of
+  life—my turn of mind—my disposition long ago impelled me to give all
+  my leisure, and all my opportunities of observation, to the
+  introduction of steam-vessels, and permanently establishing them as
+  the means of communication between India and England, including all
+  the colonies on the route. The vast importance of three months’
+  earlier information to His Majesty’s Government and to the Honourable
+  Company, whether relative to a war or a peace; to abundant or to short
+  crops; to the sickness or convalescence of a colony or district, and
+  oftentimes even of an individual; the advantages to the merchant, by
+  enabling him to regulate his supplies and orders according to
+  circumstances and demands; the anxieties of the thousands of my
+  countrymen in India for accounts, and further accounts, of their
+  parents, children, and friends at home; the corresponding anxieties of
+  those relatives and friends in this country; in a word, the speediest
+  possible transit of letters to the tens of thousands who at all times
+  in solicitude await them, was a service to my mind,” (of the greatest
+  general importance) “and it shall not be my fault if I do not, and for
+  ever, establish it.”
+
+By his indefatigable efforts in India, having extensively made known his
+plans and methods for accomplishing these great objects, and bringing
+home with him the testimonial of thanks he had received from the
+Governor in Council of Bombay, he returned to England. Let his own
+words—homely, earnest, straightforward, full of sailor-like simplicity,
+impulsive, and fraught with important results—relate his reception.
+
+  “Armed with the record of the Governor’s thanks, I commenced an active
+  agitation in India for the establishment of steam to Europe. In
+  prosecution of this design, I returned to England, expecting, of
+  course, to be received with open arms—at the India House especially.
+  Judge of my surprise on being told by the successor of Mr. Loch
+  (Chairman of the court), that the India Company required no steam to
+  the East at all!
+
+  “I told him that the feeling in India was most ardent for it; that I
+  had convened large public meetings at Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta,
+  and, in fact, all over the Peninsula, which I had traversed by _dawk_;
+  that the Governor-General, Lord William Bentinck, was enthusiastic in
+  the same cause, and had done me the honour to predict (with what
+  prescience need not now, in 1849, be stated), that if ever the object
+  was accomplished, it would be by the man who had navigated the Red Sea
+  in an open boat, under the circumstances already named.
+
+  “To all this the Chairman made answer that the Governor-General and
+  people of India had nothing to do with the India House; and if I did
+  not go back and join _their_ pilot service, to which I belonged, I
+  should receive such a communication from that House as would be by no
+  means agreeable to me!
+
+  “On the instant I penned my resignation, and placing it in his hands,
+  then gave utterance to the sentiment which actuated me from that
+  moment till the moment I realised my aspiration—that I would establish
+  the Overland Route, in spite of the India House.”
+
+How little must the public of the present day be prepared to find such a
+condition of affairs, or anything in the shape of antagonism in such a
+quarter, now that the Overland Route has become not only a practical
+thing for the “mail” but for ordinary travellers and tourists, and a
+matter of panorama and pantomime, of dioramic effects and burlesque
+songs—the sublime, and the ridiculous! But how did it fare with our
+enterprising sailor, after penning his resignation, and handing it in
+with such a declaration and defiance?
+
+  “This avowal,” says Lieutenant Waghorn, “most impolitic on my part as
+  regarded my individual interests, is perhaps the key to much of the
+  otherwise inexplicable opposition I subsequently met with from those
+  upon whose most energetic co-operation I had every apparent reason to
+  rely. I proceeded to Egypt, not only without official recommendation,
+  but with a sort of official stigma on my sanity!
+
+  “The Government nautical authorities reported that the Red Sea was not
+  navigable; and the East India Company’s naval officers declared, that,
+  if it _were_ navigable, the North-Westers peculiar to those waters,
+  and the South-West monsoons of the Indian Ocean, would swallow all
+  steamers up! And, as if there were not enough to crush me in the eyes
+  of foreigners and my own countrymen, documents were actually laid
+  before Parliament, showing that coals had cost the East India Company
+  twenty pounds per ton, at Suez, and had taken _fifteen months_ to get
+  there.”
+
+Notwithstanding all these apparently overwhelming allegations, Mr.
+Waghorn succeeded in convincing the Pasha of the entire practicability
+of his plans; and having fully gained the confidence of that potentate,
+he obtained permission to proceed according to his own judgment. By
+means of his intimate knowledge of the whole route and all its
+contingencies, Mr. Waghorn saw that coals might be brought readily
+enough to Alexandria—then up the Nile—then across the Desert on
+camels—for not more than five pounds per ton. He immediately hastened
+back to England, and was “fortunate enough” to impress his conviction on
+this point on a very able public servant, Mr. Melville, Secretary to the
+East India House; and through his instrumentality one thousand tons of
+coals were conveyed by the route, and by the means above-mentioned, from
+the pit’s mouth to the hold of the steamer at Suez, for four pounds
+three shillings and sixpence.
+
+  “From that hour to this (June, 1849), the same plan, at the same, and
+  even a smaller cost, has been pursued in respect of all the coals of
+  the East India Company,—the saving in ten years being _three quarters
+  of a million_ sterling, as between the estimated, and the actual cost
+  of coal.”
+
+Having now most deservedly obtained the friendship of the Pasha, Mr.
+Waghorn was enabled to establish mails to India, and to keep that
+service in his own hands during five years. On one occasion he actually
+succeeded in getting letters from Bombay to England in _forty-seven
+days_; and immediately afterwards both the English Government and the
+Honourable East India Company, at the pressing solicitations of the
+London, East India, and China Associations (Mr., since Sir George
+Larpent, Chairman) started mails of their own—taking from Mr. Waghorn
+the conveyance of letters, without the least compensation for the loss,
+from that time to this (1849); these authorities having, till then,
+repeatedly declared that they had no intention of having mails by this
+route at all.
+
+It should not be omitted, that, during these efforts, Mr. Waghorn
+feeling that his position in India would be much advantaged, and
+therefore his means of utility, if he could receive the rank of
+Lieutenant in the British Navy, made repeated applications to this
+effect, from 1832 to 1842. But in vain. He thought that his great
+services might have obtained this reward for him, especially as it would
+add to his means of usefulness. But no. Government, like the serpent, is
+a wonderful “wise beast,” and the ways of Ministers are inscrutable. All
+spoke of his merits, but none rewarded them. At length, in 1842, Lord
+Haddington, being Head of the Admiralty, did grant this scarce and
+astonishing honour! Egypt actually beheld the man, who had brought
+England within forty-seven days of her sands, before any steam system
+was in operation between the two countries, permitted to write the
+letters R.N. after his natural name!
+
+In conjunction with others, partners in the undertaking, Lieutenant
+Waghorn now arranged for the carriage of passengers, the building of
+hotels at Alexandria, Cairo, and other places, and he soon familiarised
+the Desert with the novel spectacle of harnessed horses, vans, and all
+the usual adjuncts of English travelling, instead of the precarious Arab
+and his primeval camel. These, with packet-boats on the Nile, and the
+canal (and afterwards with steamers), duly provided with English
+superintendants, rendered Eastern travel as easy as a journey of the
+same length in the hot summer of any of the most civilised countries.
+
+Lieutenant Waghorn had now every prospect of making this hitherto
+undreamed-of novelty as profitable to himself in remuneration of his
+many arduous labours, as it was serviceable and commodious to the vast
+numbers of all countries, especially his own, who availed themselves of
+it. But unfortunately, just when his enterprise, industry, capital, and
+his possession of Mehemet Ali’s friendship were beginning to produce
+their natural results, the honourable English Government and the
+honourable East India Company “gave the monopoly of a chartered contract
+to an opulent and powerful Company!” Lieutenant Waghorn had coupled with
+his passenger system the carriage of overland parcels, which was a
+source of great profit, and through it there was a constant accession to
+the comforts of the passengers in transit. But it would seem as if the
+Government and the India House regarded this man only as an instrument
+to work out advantages for them, in especial, and the world at large,
+but the moment he had a prospect of obtaining some reward for himself,
+it was proper to stop him. Had he not been allowed to write Lieutenant
+before his name, and R.N. after it? What more would he have?
+
+  “This Company,” says Waghorn, “already extensive carriers by water,
+  gleaned from my firm the secret of conducting my business with an
+  alleged view to supply it on a much more comprehensive scale, and _to
+  employ us in so doing_; but when nothing more remained to be learned
+  from us, we were forthwith superseded, though with a useless and
+  utterly unproductive expenditure, on the part of our successors, of
+  six times the money we should have required to accomplish the same
+  end. Overwhelmed by the competition of this giant association, I was
+  entirely deprived of all advantages of this creation of my own energy,
+  and left with it a ruin on my hands, though to have secured me at
+  least the Egyptian transit would not only have been but the merest
+  justice to an individual, but would have been a material gain to the
+  British, public, politically and otherwise. In my hand the English
+  traffic was English, and I venture to say that English it would have
+  continued to this day, had I not been interfered with. But my
+  successors gave it up to the Pasha.”
+
+The absence of all circumstantial descriptions and all graphic details
+in the papers, both printed and in manuscript, we have previously
+noticed. We had at first made sure of being able to present our readers
+with a picturesque and exciting narrative of the Life and Adventures of
+Lieutenant Waghorn—for adventures, in abundance, both on the sea and the
+Desert, he must assuredly have had; but he does not give us a single peg
+to hang an action or event upon, not a single suggestion for a romantic
+scene. Once we thought we had at last discovered among his papers a
+treasure of this kind. It was a manuscript bound in a strong cover, and
+having a patent lock. Inside was printed, in large letters, “Private:
+Daily Remembrancer: Mr. Waghorn.” It contains absolutely nothing of the
+kind that was evidently at first intended. It is crammed full of
+newspaper cuttings; and the only memoranda and remembrances are two or
+three melancholy affairs of bills and mortgages made to pay debts
+incurred in the public service. So much for his daily journal of events
+while travelling. He was manifestly so completely a man of action, that
+he could not afford a minute to note it down. Had it not been for the
+vexatious oppositions by which he was thwarted, and the painful
+memorials and petitions he was subsequently compelled, as we shall find,
+to present in various quarters, we verily believe he would have given us
+no written records at all of a single thing he did, and all that would
+have been left, in the course of a few years after his death, would have
+been the “Overland Route,” and the name of “Waghorn.”
+
+We must now take a cursory view of his labours. To do this in any
+regular order is hardly possible, partly from the space they would
+occupy, but yet more from the desultory and unmanageable condition of
+the papers and documents before us.
+
+During many years he sailed and travelled hundreds of thousands of miles
+between England and India, more particularly from the year 1827 to 1835,
+inclusive; passing up and down the Red Sea with mails, before the East
+India Company had any steam system on that sea. On one very special
+occasion, on this side the Isthmus, in October 1839, when the news
+arrived at Alexandria from Bombay, of Sir John (late Lord) Keane’s
+success at Ghuznee, he managed to obtain the use of the Pasha of Egypt’s
+own steamer, the Generoso, the very next day after Her Majesty’s steamer
+left Alexandria; and he personally commanded this vessel, and conveyed
+the mail to Malta, which was immediately sent on by the Admiral there,
+to England. Of such acts of special usefulness on occasions of great
+emergency, numerous instances might be related of him. His services in
+Egypt are well known to all who dwell there, or have travelled in that
+country. For the information of such as may not have any personal
+knowledge of these things, we may mention a few of the most prominent.
+Lieutenant Waghorn and his partners, without any aid whatever, with the
+single exception of the Bombay Steam Committee, built the eight halting
+places on the Desert, between Cairo and Suez; also the three hotels
+established above them, in which every comfort and even some luxuries
+were provided and stored for the passing traveller—among which should be
+mentioned iron tanks with good water, ranged in cellars beneath;—and all
+this in a region which was previously a waste of arid sands and
+scorching gravel, beset with wandering robbers and their camels. These
+wandering robbers he converted into faithful guides, as they are now
+found to be by every traveller; and even ladies with their infants are
+enabled to cross and recross the Desert with as much security as if they
+were in Europe.
+
+He neglected no means of making us acquainted with our position and line
+of policy in these countries. He wrote and published pamphlets in
+England to show the justice and sound policy of our having friendly
+relations with Egypt, in opposition to the undue position of Turkey
+(1837, 1838); also, to make his countrymen conversant with the character
+of Mehemet Ali, and with the countries of Egypt, Arabia, and Syria
+(1840); another on the acceleration of mails between England and the
+East (1843); and a letter to Earl Grey on emigration to Australia
+(1848). At this time, in conjunction with Mr. Wheatley, he had
+established an agency for the Overland Route to India, China, &c., and
+had offices in Cornhill, which are still in active operation. The
+enormous subsequent increase of letters to India by the mail, may be
+inferred from this fact—that in his first arrangement, Lieutenant
+Waghorn had all letters for India sent to Messrs. Smith and Elder of
+Cornhill, to be stamped, and then forwarded to him in Alexandria: the
+earliest despatches amounted to one hundred and eighty-four letters;
+this number is now more than doubled by the correspondence of Smith and
+Elder alone, on their own business. They were the first booksellers who
+rightly appreciated Mr. Waghorn’s efforts; and they cordially
+co-operated with him.
+
+  “When he left Egypt, in 1841, he had established English carriages,
+  vans, and horses, for the passengers’ conveyance across the Desert
+  (instead of camels); indeed, he placed small steamers (from England)
+  on the Nile and the canal of Alexandria. Every fraction of his money
+  was spent by him in getting more and more facilities; and, had the
+  saving of money been one of the characteristics of his nature, the
+  Overland Route would not be as useful as it now is—and this is
+  acknowledged by all. Mr. Waghorn claimed for himself, and most justly,
+  the merit of this work: he claimed it without fear of denial; and
+  stated upon his honour, that no money or means were ever received by
+  him from either Her Majesty’s Government or the East India Company to
+  aid it. It grew into life altogether from his having, by his own
+  energy and private resources, worked the ‘Overland Mails’ to and from
+  India for two years, (from 1831 to 1834) in his own individual person.
+  ‘Will it be believed,’ says he, ‘that up to that time Mr. Waghorn was
+  thought and called by many, a Visionary, and by some a Madman?’”
+
+It may very easily be believed that this was thought and said, as it is
+a common practice with the world when anything extraordinary is
+performed for the first time; and though it may be hard enough for the
+individual to bear, we may simply set it down as the first step to the
+admission of his success. But it is very clear the Pasha was wise enough
+to recognise the value of the man who had done so much, and not only
+accorded him his friendship and assistance on all occasions, but sent
+him on one occasion as his confidential messenger to Khosru Pasha, Grand
+Vizier to the Sultan at Constantinople, in 1839, as well as to Lord
+Ponsonby, who was there as Ambassador from England at this time.
+
+Nor did his merit pass unrecognised in his own country; first by the
+public generally, though, perhaps, first of all by the “Times”
+newspaper, the proprietors of which were subsequently munificent in
+their pecuniary assistance of his efforts in the Trieste experiments, as
+indeed were the morning papers generally. In six successive months he
+accomplished the gain of thirteen days _viâ_ Trieste over the Marseilles
+route. Lords Palmerston and Aberdeen, as foreign ministers of England;
+Lords Ellenborough, Glenelg, and Ripon, and Sir John Hobhouse, as
+presidents of the India Board, were also fully aware of his labours in
+bringing about the “Overland Route” through Egypt, and thus giving
+stability to English interests in our Eastern empire.
+
+And now comes the melancholy end of all these so arduous and important
+labours. Embarrassed in his own private circumstances from the
+expenditure of all his own funds, and large debts contracted besides,
+solely in effecting these public objects, he was compelled, after vainly
+endeavouring to extricate himself by establishing in London an office of
+agency for the Overland Route, to apply to the India House and the
+Government for assistance. His constitution was by this time broken up
+by the sort of toil he had gone through in the last twenty years, and he
+merely asked to have his public debts paid, and enough allowed him as a
+pension to enable him to close his few remaining days in rest. He was
+still in the prime of life; but prematurely old from his hard work.
+
+In consequence of various memorials and petitions the India House
+awarded Lieutenant Waghorn a pension of 200_l._ per annum; and the
+Government did the same. But they would not pay the debts he had
+contracted in their service. If he had made a bad bargain, he must abide
+by it, and suffer for it. Both pensions, therefore, were compromised to
+his creditors, and he remained without any adequate means of support.
+The following extract, with which we must conclude, is from his last
+memorial:—
+
+  “The immediate origin and cause of my embarrassments was a forfeited
+  promise on the part of the Treasury and the India House, whereby only
+  four instead of six thousand pounds, relied on by me, were paid
+  towards the Trieste Route experiments in the winter of 1846–7, when,
+  single-handed, and despite unparalleled and wholly unforeseen
+  difficulties, I eclipsed, on five trials out of six, the long
+  organised arrangements of the French authorities, specially stimulated
+  to all possible exertion, and supplied with unlimited means by M.
+  Guizot. On the first of these six occasions, there arose the breaking
+  down, on the Indian Ocean, of the steamer provided for me, thereby
+  trebling the computed expenses through the delay; and when, startled
+  by this excessive outlay, I hesitated to entail more, the Treasury and
+  the India House told me to proceed, to do the service well, and make
+  out my bill afterwards. I did proceed. I did the service not only
+  well, not only to the satisfaction of my employers, but in a manner
+  that elicited the admiration of Europe, as all the Continental and
+  British journals of that period, besides heaps of private
+  testimonials, demonstrated. My rivals, to whom the impediments in my
+  path were best known, were loudest in their acknowledgments; and the
+  only drawback to my just pride was the incredulity manifested in some
+  quarters, that I could have actually accomplished what (it is
+  notorious) I did at any time, much less among the all but impassable
+  roads of the Alps, in the depth of a winter of far more than ordinary
+  Alpine severity. I presented my bill. _It was dishonoured._ I had made
+  myself an invalid, had sown the seeds of a broken constitution, in the
+  performance of that duty. The disappointment occasioned by the
+  non-payment of the two thousand pounds, has preyed incessantly upon me
+  since; and now, a wreck alike almost in mind and body, I am sustained
+  alone by the hope, that the annals of the Insolvent Court will not
+  have inscribed upon them the Pioneer of the Overland Route, because of
+  obligations he incurred for the public, by direction of the public
+  authorities.”
+
+The date of this memorial is June 8th, 1849. High testimonials are
+appended to it from Lords Palmerston, Aberdeen, Ellenborough, Harrowby,
+Combermere, Ripon, Sir John Hobhouse, Sir Robert Gordon, and Mr. Joseph
+Hume. But it did not produce any effect; the debts and the harassing
+remained; and the pioneer of the Overland Route died very shortly
+afterwards;—we cannot say of a broken heart, because his constitution
+had been previously shattered by his labours. Yet it looks sadly like
+this. He might have lived some years longer. He was only forty-seven.
+The pension awarded him by the India House he had only possessed
+eighteen months; and the pension from Government had been yet more
+tardily bestowed, so that he only lived to receive the first quarter.
+
+At his death both pensions died with him, his widow being left to
+starve. The India House, however, have lately granted her a pension of
+fifty pounds; and the Government, naïvely stating, as if in excuse for
+the extravagance, that it was in consequence of the “eminent services”
+performed by her late husband, awarded her the sum of twenty-five pounds
+per annum. This twenty-five pounds having been the subject of many
+comments from the press, both of loud indignation and cutting ridicule,
+the Government made a second grant, with the statement that “in
+consequence of the _extreme_ destitution of Mrs. Waghorn,” a further sum
+was awarded of fifteen pounds more! This is the fact, and such are the
+terms of the grant. Why, it reads like an act of clemency towards some
+criminal or other offender;—“You have been very wicked, you know; but as
+you are in _extreme destitution_, here are a few pounds more.”
+
+While these above-mentioned petitions, memorials, and struggles for life
+and honour were going on, great numbers of our wealthy countrymen were
+rushing with bags of money to pour out at the feet of Mr. Hudson, M.P.,
+in reward for his having made the largest fortune in the shortest time
+ever known;—and soon after the Government munificence had been bestowed
+on the destitute widow of Lieutenant Waghorn, the Marquis of Lansdowne
+and the Marquis of Londonderry, in their places in the House of Lords,
+eulogised the splendid “military ability” of F. M. the late Duke of
+Cambridge, speaking in high terms of the great deeds he would have
+achieved, “if he had only had an opportunity,” and voting a pension of
+twelve thousand pounds a year to his destitute son, and three thousand
+pounds a year to his destitute daughter.
+
+We have now beheld the labours, and the reward, of the pioneer of the
+Overland Route; who, for the establishment of this route and for
+manifold services subsequently rendered, received the “thanks” of three
+quarters of the globe, that is to say, of Europe, Asia, and Africa,
+“besides numberless letters of ‘thanks’ from mercantile communities at
+every point where Eastern trade is concerned!” His public debts are not
+paid to this day.
+
+
+
+
+                                 CHIPS.
+
+
+                       THE KNOCKING UP BUSINESS.
+
+New wants are being continually invented, and new trades are,
+consequently, daily springing up. A correspondent brings to light a
+novel branch of the manufacturing industry of this country, which was
+revealed to him in Manchester. Lately, he observes, I was passing
+through a bye-street in Manchester, when my attention was attracted by a
+card placed conspicuously in the window of a decent-looking house, on
+which was inscribed, in good text,
+
+                 “KNOCKING UP DONE HERE AT 2D. A WEEK.”
+
+I stopped a few moments to consider what it could mean, and chose out of
+a hundred conjectures the most feasible, namely:—that it referred
+perhaps to the “getting up” of some portion of a lady’s dress, or
+knocking up some article of attire or convenience in a hurry. I asked
+persons connected with all sorts of handicrafts and small trades, and
+could get no satisfaction. I therefore determined to enquire at the
+“Knocking up” establishment itself. Thither, accordingly, I bent my
+steps. On asking for the master, a pale-faced asthmatic man came
+forward. I politely told him the object of my visit, adding, that from
+so small a return as 2d. a week, he ought to get at least half profit.
+“Why, to tell you the truth, Sir,” rejoined the honest fellow, “as my
+occupation requires no outlay or stock in trade, ’tis _all_ profit.”
+“Admirable profession!” I ejaculated, “If it is no secret, I should like
+to be initiated; for several friends of mine are very anxious to
+commence business on the same terms.”
+
+Not having the fear of rivalry before his eyes, he solved the mystery
+without any stipulations as to secrecy or premium. He said that he was
+employed by a number of young men and women who worked in factories, to
+call them up by a certain early hour in the morning; for if they
+happened to oversleep themselves and to arrive at the mill after work
+had commenced, they were liable to the infliction of a fine, and
+therefore, to insure being up in good time, employed him to “knock them
+up” at two-pence a week.
+
+On further enquiry, he told me that he himself earned fourteen shillings
+per week, and his son—only ten years old—awoke factory people enough to
+add four shillings more to his weekly income. He added, that a friend of
+his did a very extensive “knocking up” business, his connexion being
+worth thirty shillings per week; and one woman he knew had a circuit
+that brought her in twenty-four shillings weekly.
+
+There is an old saying, that one half the world does not know how the
+other half live. I question whether ninety-nine hundredths of your
+readers will have known till you permit me to inform them how our
+Manchester friends, in the “Knocking up” line, get a livelihood.
+
+
+
+
+                   STATISTICS OF FACTORY SUPERVISION.
+
+
+The Rev. Mr. Baker has recently issued a pamphlet, defending the moral
+tone of the factory system against the charges brought against it in the
+Rev. H. Worsley’s Prize Essay on Juvenile Depravity. We purposely
+abstain from discussing the merits of the controversy, believing that
+the truth lies between the two extremes advocated respectively by the
+reverend disputants. Mr. Henry, however, gives a table of statistics, an
+abstract of which we cannot withhold. It shows the number of spinning
+and power-loom weaving concerns in the principal manufacturing districts
+of Lancashire and Cheshire; also, the number of partners, so far as they
+are known to the public.
+
+It appears that in Ashton-under-Lyne, Dunkinfield, and Moseley, there
+are fifty-three mills in the hands of ninety-five partners; Blackburn,
+and its immediate neighbourhood, has fifty-seven mills and eighty
+partners; Bolton, forty-two mills and fifty-seven partners; Barnley,
+twenty-five spinning manufactories and forty-six proprietors; at Heywood
+there are twenty-eight mills in the hands of forty-six masters.
+Manchester, it would appear, is not so much the seat of manufacture as
+of merchandise. Though it abounds in warehouses for the sale of cotton
+goods, there are no more than seventy-eight cotton factories, having one
+hundred and thirty-nine masters. Oldham has the greatest number of
+mills; namely, one hundred and fifty-eight, with two hundred and
+fifty-two proprietors; Preston, thirty-eight mills, sixty-two partners;
+Stalybridge, twenty cotton concerns and forty-one proprietors;
+Stockport, forty-seven mills and seventy-six masters; while Warrington
+has no more than four mills, owned by ten gentlemen. The total number of
+cotton manufactories in these districts is five hundred and fifty, which
+belong to nine hundred and four “Cotton Lords.”
+
+Mr. Baker’s “case” is that a proper moral supervision is exercised over
+the tens of thousands of operatives employed in these factories; and
+that such supervision is not delegated from principals to subordinates.
+It would seem, from his showing, that of the nine hundred and four
+proprietors, no more than twenty-nine do not reside where their concerns
+are situated; and that of the entire aggregate of mills, there are only
+four in or near to which no proprietor resides. Lancashire and Cheshire
+cotton factories, therefore, are as regards absenteeism, the direct
+antithesis of Irish estates. The consequence is, that while the former
+are in a state of average, though intermittent prosperity, the latter
+have gone to ruin.
+
+
+
+
+                  COMIC LEAVES FROM THE STATUTE BOOK.
+
+
+The most manifest absurdities while remaining in fashion receive the
+greatest respect; for it is not till Time affords a retrospect that the
+full force of the absurdity is revealed. When men and women went about
+dressed like the characters in the farce of Tom Thumb, we of the present
+day wonder that they excited no mirth; nor can we now believe that
+Betterton drew tears as _Cato_ in a full-bottomed wig. A beauty who a
+dozen years ago excited admiration in the balloon-like costume of that
+day, would now, if presenting herself in full-blown leg-of-mutton
+sleeves, excite a smile. The more intelligent natives of Mexico are now
+more disposed to grin than to shudder, as they once did, at their
+comical idols. Everybody has heard of the monkey-god of India. In our
+day, those who once adored and dreaded him, would as readily worship
+_Punch_, and receive his squeakings for oracles, as to bow down before
+the Great Monkey.
+
+Amongst the most prominent superstitions in which our forefathers
+believed, as a commercial opinion and rule of legislation, was
+“Protection;” and we have not awakened too recently from the delusion
+which descended from them not to perceive its absurdities, especially on
+looking over their voluminous legacy, the Statute Book. Before, however,
+we open some of its most comical pages, let us premise that the question
+of Protection is not a political one. Of the precise force and meaning
+of the term, there is a large class of “constant readers” who have no
+definite idea. The word “Protection” calls up in their minds a sort of
+phantasmagoria composed chiefly of Corn-law leagues, tedious debates in
+Parliament, Custom-houses, excisemen, smugglers, preventive-men and
+mounted coast-guards. They know it has to do with imports, exports,
+drawbacks, the balance of trade, and with being searched when they step
+ashore from a Boulogne steamer. Floating over this indefinite
+construction of the term, they have a general opinion that Protection
+must be a good thing, for they also associate it most intimately with
+the guardianship of the law, which protects them from the swindler, and
+with the policeman, who protects them from the thief. That powerful and
+patriotic sentiment, “Protection to British Industry,” must, they think,
+be nearly the same sort of thing, except that it means protection from
+the tricks of foreigners instead of from those of compatriots. They
+confess that, believing the whole matter to be a complicated branch of
+politics, they have had neither time nor patience to “go into it.”
+
+In supposing the question of Free Trade or Protection to be a political
+one, they are, as we have before hinted, in error. It has no more to do
+with politics than their own transactions with the grocer and the
+coal-merchant; for it treats of the best mode of carrying on a nation’s,
+instead of an individual’s dealings with foreign marts and foreign
+customers. They are also wrong in supposing that protection to life and
+property is of the same character as that to which British industry is
+subjected. The difference can be easily explained; and although
+doubtless the majority of our readers are quite aware of it, yet for the
+benefit of the above-described, who are not, we will point it
+out:—Connected, as everybody knows, with whatever is protected, there
+must be two parties—A, in whose _favour_ it is protected; and B,
+_against_ whom it is protected. Legitimate and wholesome protection
+preserves the property we wish to guard against our enemies; impolitic
+and unwholesome protection too securely preserves property to us which
+we are most anxious to get rid of—by sale or barter,—against our best
+friends, our customers.
+
+These elementary explanations are absolutely essential for the thorough
+enjoyment of the broad comedy, which here and there lightens up that
+grave publication, the Statutes at Large.
+
+When the laws had protected English manufacturers, and producers from
+foreign produce and skill; they, by a natural sequence of blundering,
+set about protecting the British manufacturing population one against
+another, and the German jest of the wig-makers, who petitioned their
+Crown Prince “to make it felony for any gentleman to wear his own hair,”
+is almost realised. In the palmy days of Protection, a British
+bookbinder could not use paste, nor a British dandy, hair-powder,
+because the British farmer had been so tightly protected against foreign
+corn, that the British public could not get enough of it to make bread
+to eat.
+
+These were perhaps the most expensive absurdities into which John Bull
+was driven by his mania for protection, but they were by no means the
+most ludicrous. Among his other dainty devices for promoting the woollen
+manufacture, was the law which compelled all dead bodies to be buried in
+woollen cloth. There may not be many who can sympathise with the agony
+of Pope’s dying coquette:—
+
+             “Odious! In woollen! ’Twould a saint provoke;
+             Were the last words that poor Narcissa spoke.”
+
+But every one must be astounded at the folly of bribing men to invest
+ingenuity and industry, to bury that which above ground was the most
+useful and saleable, of all possible articles. The intention was to
+discourage the use of cotton, which has since proved one of the greatest
+sources of wealth ever brought into this country.
+
+The strangest and most practical protest of national common sense,
+against laws enacting protective duties, was the impossibility of
+compelling people to obey them. To those laws the country has been
+indebted for the expensive coast-guards, who cannot, after all, prevent
+smuggling. The disproportionate penalties threatened by protective laws,
+show how difficult it was to ensure obedience. In 1765, so invincible
+was the desire of our ladies to do justice to their neat ancles, that a
+law had to be passed in the fifth of George the Third, (chapter
+forty-eight,) decreeing that “if any foreign manufactured silk
+stockings, &c., be imported into any part of the British dominions, they
+shall be forfeited, and the importers, retailers, or vendors of the
+same, shall be subject, for every such offence, to a fine of two hundred
+pounds, with costs of suit.” The wise legislators did not dare to extend
+the penalties to the fair wearers, who found means to make it worth the
+while of the vendors to brave and evade the law.
+
+The complicated and contradictory legislation into which the _ignis
+fatuus_ of Protection led men, made our nominally protective laws not
+unfrequently laws prohibitive of industry. To protect the iron-masters
+of Staffordshire, the inhabitants of Pennsylvania (while yet a British
+colony) were forbidden, under heavy penalties, to avail themselves of
+their rich coal and iron mines. To protect the tobacco growers of
+Virginia (also in its colonial epoch) the agriculturists of Great
+Britain were forbidden to cultivate the plant—a prohibition which is
+still in force—even now, that the semblance of a reason or excuse for
+the restriction exists.
+
+The petty details into which these prohibitions of industry, under the
+pretext of protecting it, descended, can only be conceived by those who
+have studied the Statutes at Large. An act was passed in the fourth of
+George the First (the seventh chapter) for the better employing the
+manufacturers, and encouraging the consumption of raw silk. This act
+provides “that no person shall make, sell, or set upon any clothes or
+wearing garments whatsoever, any buttons made of serge, cloth, drugget,
+frieze, camlet, or any other stuff of which clothes or wearing garments
+are made, or any buttons made of wool only, and turned in imitations of
+other buttons, on pain of forfeiting forty shillings per dozen for all
+such buttons.” And again, in the seventh year of the same George, the
+twenty-second chapter of that year’s statutes declared that “No tailors
+shall set on any buttons or button-holes of serge, drugget, &c., under
+penalty of forty shillings for every dozen of buttons or button-holes so
+made or set on.... No person shall use or wear on any clothes, garments,
+or apparel whatsoever, except velvet, any buttons or button-holes made
+of or bound with cloth, serge, drugget, frieze, camlet, or other stuffs
+whereof clothes or woollen garments are usually made, on penalty of
+forfeiting forty shillings per dozen under a similar penalty.” These
+acts were insisted on by the ancient and important fraternity of metal
+button-makers, who thought they had a prescriptive right to supply the
+world with brass and other buttons “with shanks.” Shankless fasteners,
+made of cloth, serge, &c., were therefore interdicted; and every man,
+woman, and child, down to the time when George the Third was king, was
+_obliged_ to wear metal buttons whether they liked them or not, on pain
+of fine or imprisonment.
+
+The shackles and pitfalls in which men involved themselves in their
+chase after the illusive idea of universal protection were as numerous,
+and more fatal than those with which Louis the Eleventh garnished his
+castle at Plessis-le-Tours. It was impossible to move without stumbling
+into some of them. British ship-builders were allowed to ply their trade
+exclusively for British ship-owners; but, in return, they were compelled
+to buy the dear timber of Canada, instead of that of the Baltic. British
+ship-owners had exclusive privileges of ocean carriage, but had to pay
+tribute to the monopoly of British ship-builders and Canadian lumberers.
+British sailors were exclusively to be employed in English ships, but in
+return they were at the mercy of the press-gangs. Dubious advantages
+were bought at a price unquestionably dear and ruinous.
+
+The condition of our country while possessed by the fallacy of
+protection, can be compared to nothing so aptly, as to a man under the
+influence of a nightmare. One incongruity pursues another through the
+brain. There is a painful half-consciousness that all is delusion, and a
+fear that it may be reality—there is a choking sense of oppression. The
+victim of the unhealthy dream, tries to shake it off and awaken, but his
+faculties are spell-bound. By a great effort the country has awakened to
+the light of day, and a sense of realities.
+
+The way in which the rural population, great and small, were protected
+against one another, may be well illustrated by an extract from the
+third of James the First, chapter fourteen. This act was in force so
+lately as 1827, for it was only repealed by the seventh and eighth of
+George the Fourth, chapter twenty-seven. The fifth clause of this
+precious enactment made a man who had not forty pounds a year a
+“malefactor” if he shot a hare; while a neighbour who possessed a
+hundred a year, and caught him in the fact, became in one moment his
+judge and executioner. After reciting that if any person who had not
+real property producing forty pounds a year, or who had not two hundred
+pounds’ worth of goods and chattels, shall presume to shoot game, the
+clause goes on to say—“Then any person, having lands, tenements, and
+hereditaments, of the clear value of one hundred pounds a year, may take
+from the person or possession of such malefactor or malefactors, and to
+his own use for ever keep, such guns, bows, cross-bows, buckstalls,
+engine-traps, nets, ferrets, and coney dogs,” &c. This is hardly a comic
+leaf from the statute book. Indignation gives place to mirth on perusing
+it. Some portions of the game-laws still in force could be enumerated,
+equally unreasonable and summary.
+
+Most of the statutes contain a comical set of rules of English Grammar,
+which are calculated to make the wig of Lindley Murray stiffen in his
+grave with horror; they run thus:—“Words importing the singular number
+shall include the plural number, and words importing the plural number
+shall include the singular number. Words importing the masculine gender
+shall include females. The word ‘person’ shall include a corporation,
+whether aggregate or sole. The word ‘lands’ shall include messuages,
+lands, tenements, and hereditaments of any tenure. The word ‘street’
+shall extend to and include any road, square, court, alley, and
+thoroughfare, or public passage, within the limits of the special act.
+The expression ‘two justices’ shall be understood to mean two or more
+justices met and acting together.”
+
+Thus ends our chapter of only a few of the mirth provocatives of the
+Statutes at Large.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+
+                          TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
+
+
+ ● Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
+ ● Renumbered footnotes.
+ ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
+ ● The caret (^) is used to indicate superscript, whether applied to a
+     single character (as in 2^d) or to an entire expression (as in
+     1^{st}).
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78191 ***
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+  <body>   
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78191 ***</div>
+
+<div class='tnotes covernote'>
+
+<p class='c000'><strong>Transcriber’s Note:</strong></p>
+
+<p class='c000'>New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class='double titlepage'>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c0'>
+<div class='nf-center c001'>
+    <div>“<i>Familiar in their Mouths as HOUSEHOLD WORDS.</i>”—<span class='sc'>Shakespeare.</span></div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<div>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_481'>481</span>
+  <h1 class='c002'>HOUSEHOLD WORDS.<br> <span class='xlarge'>A WEEKLY JOURNAL.</span></h1>
+</div>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c0'>
+<div class='nf-center c001'>
+    <div><span class='large'>CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS.</span></div>
+    <div class='c001'>N<sup>o.</sup> 21.]&#8196; &#8196; &#8196; SATURDAY, AUGUST 17, 1850.&#8196; &#8196; &#8196; [<span class='sc'>Price</span> 2<i>d.</i></div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c003'>THE RAILWAY WONDERS OF LAST YEAR.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c004'>The unblushing individual who inflated the
+first bubble prospectus in the early days of
+Railway scheming must regard, if he be still
+in existence (and we have good reason to
+believe that he lives, a prosperous gentleman),
+with superlative amazement the last Report of
+Her Majesty’s Railway Commissioners.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>When in his dazzling document the preposterous
+“promoter” certified the forthcoming
+goods transit at six times the amount
+his most sanguine “traffic-taker” could conscientiously
+compute; when he quadrupled
+the boldest calculations of the expected number
+of passengers—when, in short, he projected
+his prognostics beyond the widest bounds of
+probability, and then added a few cyphers at
+the end of each sum, to make “round
+numbers”—he was not so mad as to believe
+that he lied in the least like truth. Mad as
+he was <i>not</i>, he never could have supposed
+that an after-time would come when his lying
+prospectus would be pronounced as far short
+of, as his mendacious imagination endeavoured
+to make it exceed, the Truth. But that time
+has arrived.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Let us suppose a friend of his, a far-seeing
+prophet, reading a proof of the pet prospectus
+by the aid of magnifying glasses; let us figure
+the statistical foreteller of future events
+assuring its author that, twenty years thence,
+his immeasurable exaggerations would be out-exaggerated
+by what should actually come to
+pass; that his brazen bait to catch share-jobbers
+would shrink—when placed beside
+the Railway records of eighteen-hundred-and-forty-nine—into
+a puny, minimised, understatement.
+How he would have laughed!
+How immediately his mind would have reverted
+from the sanguine seer to the terminus
+of flighty intellects known as Bedlam. With
+what remarkable unction he would have
+said, “Phoo! Phoo! My good fellow, you
+must be lapsing into lunacy. What! Do you
+mean to say I have not laid it on thick
+enough? Why, look here!” and he turns to
+the latest of the Stamp Office stage-coach
+returns: “Do you mean to tell me—now that
+coach travelling has arrived at perfection, and
+that the wonderful average of coach passengers
+is six millions a year—that, instead
+of quadrupling the number of travellers who
+are likely to use my line, I ought to multiply
+them by a hundred? Why, you may as well
+try to persuade me that I ought to promise
+for our locomotives twenty, instead of fifteen,
+miles an hour; which—Heaven forgive me—I
+have had the courage to set down. Stuff!
+If I were to romance at that rate, we should
+not sell a share.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>And our would-be Major Longbow would
+have had reason for the faith that was in him.
+In his highest flights he dared not exceed too
+violently the statistics of G. R. Porter, or have
+added too high a premium on the expectations
+of George Stephenson. The former calculated
+that up to the end of 1834, when not a hundred
+miles of Railway were open, the annual
+average of persons who travelled by coach
+was about two millions, each going over one
+hundred and eighty miles of ground in the
+year.<a id='r1'></a><a href='#f1' class='c006'><sup>[1]</sup></a> Supposing each individual performed
+that distance in three journeys, the whole
+number of <i>persons</i> must have multiplied themselves
+into six millions of <i>passengers</i>. As to
+speed, Mr. George Stephenson said at a dinner-party
+given to him at Newcastle in 1844,
+that when he planned the Liverpool and
+Manchester line, the directors entreated him,
+when they went to Parliament, not to talk of
+going at a faster rate than ten miles an hour,
+or he “would put a cross upon the concern.”
+Mr. George Stephenson <i>did</i> talk of fifteen
+miles an hour, and some of the Committee
+asked if he were not mad! Mr. Nicholas Wood
+delivered himself in a pamphlet as follows:—
+“It is far from my wish to promulgate to
+the world that the ridiculous expectations, or
+rather <i>professions</i>, of the <i>enthusiastic speculatist</i>
+will be realised, and that we shall see engines
+travelling at the rate of twelve, sixteen,
+eighteen, twenty miles an hour. Nothing
+could do more harm towards their general
+adoption and improvement than the promulgation
+of such <span class='fss'>NONSENSE</span>!”</p>
+
+<div class='footnote' id='f1'>
+<p class='c005'><a href='#r1'>1</a>. “Porter’s Progress of the Nation,” vol. ii. p. 22.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>It would seem, then, that the Longbow of the
+aboriginal prospectuses was actually modest in
+his estimate as to passengers and speed. But
+only a few years must have made him utterly
+ashamed of his moderation and modesty. How
+disgusted he must have felt with his timid
+prolusions, even when 1843 arrived. For that
+year revealed travellers’ tales that exceeded
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_482'>482</span>his early romances by what Major Longbow
+himself would have called “an everlasting
+long chalk.” Within that year, seventy
+railroads, constructed at an outlay of sixty
+millions sterling, conveyed twenty-five millions
+of passengers three hundred and thirty millions
+of miles, at an average cost of one penny and
+three quarters per mile, and an average speed
+of twenty-four miles per hour, with but one
+fatal accident.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>But if our parent of railway proprietors
+were astonished at what happened in 1843,
+with what inconceivable amazement he must
+peruse the details of 1849! We should like
+to see the expression of his countenance while
+conning the report of Her Majesty’s Commissioners
+of Railways for last year. At the
+end of every sentence he would be sure to
+exclaim, “Who <i>would</i> have thought it?”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>From this unimpeachable record of scarcely
+credible statistics, it appears that at the end of
+1849 there were, in Great Britain and Ireland,
+five thousand five hundred and ninety-six
+miles of railway in active operation; upwards
+of four thousand five hundred and fifty-six of
+which are in England, eight hundred and
+forty-six in Scotland, and four hundred and
+ninety-four in Ireland. Besides this, the
+number of miles which have been authorised
+by Parliament, and still remain to be finished
+is six thousand and thirty; so that, if all
+the lines were completed, the three kingdoms
+would be intersected by a net-work
+of railroad measuring twelve thousand miles:
+but of this there is only a remote probability,
+the number of miles in course of active construction
+being no more than one thousand
+five hundred, so that by the end of the present
+year it is calculated that the length of finished
+and operative railway may be about seven
+thousand four hundred miles, or as many as
+lie between Great Britain and the Cape of
+Good Hope, with a thousand miles to spare.
+The number of persons employed on the 30th
+of June, 1849, in the operative railways was
+fifty-four thousand; on the unopened lines,
+one hundred and four thousand.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>When the schemer of the infancy of the giant
+railway system turns to the passenger-account
+for the year 1849, he declares he is fairly
+“knocked over.” He finds that the railway
+passengers are put down at <i>sixty-three million
+eight hundred thousand</i>; nearly three times the
+number returned for 1843, and <i>a hundred times</i>
+as many as took to the road in the days of
+stage-coaches. The passengers of 1849 actually
+double the sum of the entire population of
+the three kingdoms.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>The statement of capital which the six
+thousand miles now being hourly travelled
+over represents, will require the reader to
+draw a long breath;—it is one hundred and
+ninety-seven and a half millions of pounds
+sterling. Add to this the cash being disbursed
+for the lines in progress, the total rises to two
+hundred and twenty millions! The average
+cost of each mile of railway, including engines,
+carriages, stations, &#38;c., (technically called
+“plant,”) is thirty-three thousand pounds.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Has this outlay proved remunerative? The
+Commissioners tell us, that the gross receipts
+from all the railways in 1849 amounted to
+eleven millions, eight hundred and six thousand
+pounds; from which, if the working expenses
+be deducted at the rate of forty-three per cent.
+(being about an average taken from the published
+statements of a number of the principal
+companies), there remains a net available
+profit of about six millions seven hundred
+and twenty-nine thousand four hundred and
+twenty pounds to remunerate the holders of
+property to the amount of one hundred and
+ninety-seven millions and a half; or at the
+rate, within a fraction, of three and a half
+per cent. Here our parent of railway prospectuses
+chuckles. <i>He</i> promised twenty per
+cent. per annum.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>In short, in everything except the dividends,
+our scheming friend finds that recent
+fact has outstripped his early fictions. He
+told the nervous old ladies and shaky “half-pays”
+on his projected line, that Railways
+were quite as safe as stage-coaches. What
+say the grave records of 1849? The lives of
+five passengers were lost during that year and
+those by one accident—a cause, of course,
+beyond the control of the victims; eighteen
+more casualties took place, for which the
+sufferers had themselves alone to blame. Five
+lives lost by official mismanagement, out of
+sixty-four millions of risks, is no very outrageous
+proportion; especially when we reflect
+that, taking as a basis the calculations
+of 1843, the number of miles travelled over
+per rail during last year, may be set down at
+eight hundred and forty-five millions; or <i>nine
+times the distance between the earth and the sun</i>.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Such are the Railway wonders of the year
+of grace, one thousand eight hundred and
+forty-nine.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c003'>THE WATER-DROPS.<br> <span class='large'>A FAIRY TALE.</span></h2>
+</div>
+<h3 class='c007'>CHAPTER THE FIRST.</h3>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c0'>
+<div class='nf-center c008'>
+    <div>The Suitors of Cirrha, and the young Lady; with a reference to her Papa.</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>Far in the west there is a land mountainous,
+and bright of hue, wherein the rivers
+run with liquid light; the soil is all of yellow
+gold; the grass and foliage are of resplendent
+crimson; where the atmosphere is partly of a
+soft green tint, and partly azure. Sometimes
+on summer evenings we see this land, and
+then, because our ignorance must refer all
+things that we see, to something that we
+know, we say it is a mass of clouds made
+beautiful by sunset colours. We account for
+it by principles of Meteorology. The fact has
+been omitted from the works of Kaemtz or
+Daniell; but, notwithstanding this neglect, it
+is well known in many nurseries, that the
+bright land we speak of, is a world inhabited
+by fairies. Few among fairies take more
+interest in man’s affairs than the good Cloud
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_483'>483</span>Country People; this truth is established by
+the story I am now about to tell.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Not long ago there were great revels held
+one evening in the palace of King Cumulus,
+the monarch of the western country. Cirrha,
+the daughter of the king, was to elect her
+future husband from a multitude of suitors.
+Cirrha was a maiden delicate and pure, with
+a skin white as unfallen snow; but colder
+than the snow her heart had seemed to all
+who sought for her affections. When Cirrha
+floated gracefully and slowly through her
+father’s hall, many a little cloud would start
+up presently to tread where she had trodden.
+The winds also pursued her; and even men
+looked up admiringly whenever she stepped
+forth into their sky. To be sure they called
+her Mackerel and Cat’s Tail, just as they call
+her father Ball of Cotton; for the race of
+man is a coarse race, and calling bad names
+appears to be a great part of its business here
+below.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Before the revels were concluded, the King
+ordered a quiet little wind to run among the
+guests, and bid them all come close to him
+and to his daughter. Then he spoke to them
+as follows:—</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Worthy friends! there are among you
+many suitors to my daughter Cirrha, who is
+pledged this evening to choose a husband.
+She bids me tell you that she loves you all;
+but since it is desirable that this our royal
+house be strengthened by a fit alliance with
+some foreign power, she has resolved to take
+as husband one of those guests who have
+come hither from the principality of Nimbus.”
+Now, Nimbus is that country, not seldom
+visible from some parts of our earth, which
+we have called the Rain-Cloud. “The subjects
+of the Prince of Nimbus,” Cumulus
+continued, “are a dark race, it is true, but
+they are famed for their beneficence.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Two winds, at this point, raised between
+themselves a great disturbance, so that there
+arose a universal cry that somebody should
+turn them out. With much trouble they
+were driven out from the assembly; thereupon,
+quite mad with jealousy and disappointment,
+they went howling off to sea, where
+they played pool-billiards with a fleet of ships,
+and so forgot their sorrow.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>King Cumulus resumed his speech, and
+said that he was addressing himself, now,
+especially to those of his good friends who
+came from Nimbus. “To-night, let them
+retire to rest, and early the next morning let
+each of them go down to Earth; whichever
+of them should be found on their return to
+have been engaged below in the most useful
+service to the race of man, that son of Nimbus
+should be Cirrha’s husband.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Cumulus, having said this, put a white
+nightcap on his head, which was the signal
+for a general retirement. The golden ground
+of his dominions was covered for the night,
+as well as the crimson trees, with cotton.
+So the whole kingdom was put properly to
+bed. Late in the night the moon got up,
+and threw over King Cumulus a silver
+counterpane.</p>
+
+<h3 class='c009'>CHAPTER THE SECOND.</h3>
+
+<p class='c010'>The Adventures of Nebulus and Nubis.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>The suitors of the Princess Cirrha, who
+returned to Nimbus, were a-foot quite early
+the next morning, and petitioned their good-natured
+Prince to waft them over London.
+They had agreed among themselves, that by
+descending there, where men were densely congregated,
+they should have a greater chance of
+doing service to the human race. Therefore the
+Rain-Cloud floated over the great City of the
+World, and, as it passed at sundry points, the
+suitors came down upon rain-drops to perform
+their destined labour. Where each might
+happen to alight depended almost wholly
+upon accident; so that their adventures were
+but little better than a lottery for Cirrha’s
+hand. One, who had been the most magniloquent
+among them all, fell with his pride
+upon the patched umbrella of an early-breakfast
+woman, and from thence was shaken off
+into a puddle. He was splashed up presently,
+mingled with soil, upon the corduroys of a
+labourer, who stopped for breakfast on his
+way to work. From thence, evaporating, he
+returned crest-fallen to the Land of Clouds.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Among the suitors there were two kind-hearted
+fairies, Nebulus and Nubis, closely
+bound by friendship to each other. While
+they were in conversation, Nebulus, who
+suddenly observed that they were passing
+over some unhappy region, dropped, with
+a hope that he might bless it. Nubis passed
+on, and presently alighted on the surface of
+the Thames.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>The district which had wounded the kind
+heart of Nebulus was in a part of Bermondsey,
+called Jacob’s Island. The fairy fell into a
+ditch; out of this, however, he was taken by a
+woman, who carried him to her own home,
+among other ditch-water, within a pail. Nebulus
+abandoned himself to complete despair,
+for what claim could he now establish on the
+hand of Cirrha? The miserable plight of the
+poor fairy we may gather from a description
+given by a son of man of the sad place to
+which he had descended. “In this Island
+may be seen, at any time of the day, women
+dipping water, with pails attached by ropes to
+the backs of the houses, from a foul fetid
+ditch, its banks coated with a compound of
+mud and filth, and strewed with offal and
+carrion; the water to be used for every
+purpose, culinary ones not excepted; although
+close to the place whence it is drawn, filth
+and refuse of various kinds are plentifully
+showered into it from the outhouses of the
+wooden houses overhanging its current, or
+rather slow and sluggish stream; their posts
+or supporters rotten, decayed, and, in many
+instances broken and the filth dropping
+into the water, to be seen by any passer by.
+During the summer, crowds of boys bathe
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_484'>484</span>in the putrid ditches, where they must come
+in contact with abominations highly injurious.”<a id='r2'></a><a href='#f2' class='c006'><sup>[2]</sup></a></p>
+
+<div class='footnote' id='f2'>
+<p class='c005'><a href='#r2'>2</a>. Report of Mr. Bowie on the cause of Cholera in Bermondsey.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>So Nebulus was carried in a pail out of
+the ditch to a poor woman’s home, and put
+into a battered saucepan with some other
+water. Thence, after boiling, he was poured
+into an earthen tea-pot over some stuff of
+wretched flavour, said to be tea. Now,
+thought the fairy, after all, I may give pleasure
+at the breakfast of these wretched people.
+He pictured to himself a scene of love as
+preface to a day of squalid toil, but he experienced
+a second disappointment. The
+woman took him to another room of which
+the atmosphere was noisome; there he saw
+that he was destined for the comfort of a man
+and his two children, prostrate upon the floor
+beneath a heap of rags. These three were
+sick; the woman swore at them, and Nebulus
+shrunk down into the bottom of the tea-pot.
+Even the thirst of fever could not tolerate
+too much of its contents, so Nebulus, after a
+little time, was carried out and thrown into a
+heap of filth upon the gutter.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Nubis, in the meantime, had commenced
+his day with hope of a more fortunate career.
+On falling first into the Thames he had been
+much annoyed by various pollutions, and
+been surprised to find, on kissing a few
+neighbour drops, that their lips tasted inky.
+This was caused, they said, by chalk pervading
+the whole river in the proportion of sixteen
+grains to the gallon. That was what made
+their water inky to the taste of those who
+were accustomed to much purer draughts.
+“It makes,” they explained, “our river-water
+hard, according to man’s phrase; so hard as to
+entail on multitudes who use it, some disease,
+with much expense and trouble.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“But all the mud and filth,” said Nubis,
+“surely no man drinks that?”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“No,” laughed the River-Drops, “not all of
+it. Much of the water used in London passes
+through filters, and a filter suffers no mud or
+any impurity to pass, except what is dissolved.
+The chalk is dissolved, and there is filth and
+putrid gas dissolved.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“That is a bad business,” said Nubis, who
+already felt his own drops exercising that
+absorbent power for which water is so famous,
+and incorporating in their substance matters
+that the Rain-Cloud never knew.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Presently Nubis found himself entangled
+in a current, by which he was sucked through
+a long pipe into a meeting of Water-Drops, all
+summoned from the Thames. He himself
+passed through a filter, was received into a
+reservoir, and, having asked the way of
+friendly neighbours, worked for himself with
+small delay a passage through the mainpipe
+into London.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Bewildered by his long, dark journey underground,
+Nubis at length saw light, and presently
+dashed forth out of a tap into a pitcher. He saw
+that there was fixed under the tap a water-butt,
+but into this he did not fall. A crowd of
+women holding pitchers, saucepans, pails,
+were chattering and screaming over him, and
+the anxiety of all appeared to be to catch the
+water as it ran out of the tap, before it came
+into the tub or cistern. Nubis rejoiced that
+his good fortune brought him to a district
+in which it might become his privilege to
+bless the poor, and his eye sparkled as his
+mistress, with many rests upon the way,
+carried her pitcher and a heavy pail upstairs.
+She placed both vessels, full of water, underneath
+her bed, and then went out again for
+more, carrying a basin and a fish-kettle.
+Nubis pitied the poor creature, heartily
+wishing that he could have poured out of a
+tap into the room itself to save the time and
+labour of his mistress.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>The pitcher wherein the good fairy lurked, remained
+under the bed through the remainder
+of that day, and during the next night, the
+room being, for the whole time, closely tenanted.
+Long before morning, Nubis felt that
+his own drops and all the water near him had
+lost their delightful coolness, and had been
+busily absorbing smells and vapours from the
+close apartment. In the morning, when the
+husband dipped a teacup in the pitcher,
+Nubis readily ran into it, glad to escape from
+his unwholesome prison. The man putting
+the water to his lips, found it so warm and
+repulsive, that, in a pet, he flung it from the
+window, and it fell into the water-butt
+beneath.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>The water-butt was of the common sort,
+described thus by a member of the human
+race:— “Generally speaking, the wood becomes
+decomposed and covered with fungi;
+and indeed, I can best describe their condition
+by terming them filthy.” This water-butt
+was placed under the same shed with a
+neglected cesspool, from which the water—ever
+absorbing—had absorbed pollution. It contained
+a kitten among other trifles. “How
+many people have to drink out of this butt?”
+asked Nubis. “Really I cannot tell you,” said
+a neighbour Drop. “Once I was in a butt in
+Bethnal Green, twenty-one inches across, and a
+foot deep, which was to supply forty-eight
+families.<a id='r3'></a><a href='#f3' class='c006'><sup>[3]</sup></a> People store for themselves, and
+when they know how dirty these tubs are, they
+should not use them.” “But the labour of
+dragging water home, the impossibility of
+taking home abundance, the pollution of keeping
+it in dwelling-rooms and under beds.”  “Oh,
+yes,” said the other Drop; “all very true.
+Besides, our water is not of a sort to keep. In
+this tub there is quite a microscopic vegetable
+garden, so I heard a doctor say who yesterday
+came hither with a party to inspect the district.
+One of them said he had a still used
+only for distilling water, and that one day, by
+chance, the bottoms of a series of distillations
+boiled to dryness. Thereupon, the dry mass
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_485'>485</span>became heated to the decomposing point, and
+sent abroad a stench plain to the dullest nose
+as the peculiar stench of decomposed organic
+matter. It infected, he said, the produce of
+many distillations afterwards.”<a id='r4'></a><a href='#f4' class='c006'><sup>[4]</sup></a> “I tell you
+what,” said Nubis, “water may come down
+into this town innocent enough, but it’s no
+easy matter for it to remain good among so
+many causes of corruption. Heigho!” Then
+he began to dream of Princess Cirrha and the
+worthy Prince of Nimbus, until he was
+aroused by a great tumult. It was an uproar
+caused by drunken men. “Why are those
+men so?” said Nubis to his friend. “I don’t
+know,” said the Water-Drop, “but I saw many
+people in that way last night, and I have seen
+them so at Bethnal Green.” A woman pulled
+her husband by, with loud reproaches for his
+visits to the beer-shop. “Why,” cried the
+man, with a great oath, “where would you
+have me go for drink?” Then, with another
+oath, he kicked the water-butt in passing—“You
+would not have me to go there!” All
+the bystanders laughed approvingly, and
+Nubis bade adieu to his ambition for the hand
+of Cirrha.</p>
+
+<div class='footnote' id='f3'>
+<p class='c005'><a href='#r3'>3</a>. Report of Dr. Gavin.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class='footnote' id='f4'>
+<p class='c005'><a href='#r4'>4</a>. Evidence of Mr. J. T. Cooper, Practical Chemist.</p>
+</div>
+
+<h3 class='c009'>CHAPTER THE THIRD.</h3>
+
+<p class='c011'>Nephelo goes into Polite Society, and then into a Dungeon.—His
+Escape, Recapture, and his Perilous Ascent into
+the Sky, surrounded by a Blaze of Fire.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Nephelo was a light-hearted subject of
+the Prince of Nimbus. It is he who often
+floats, when the whole cloud is dark, as a
+white vapour on the surface. For love of
+Cirrha, he came down behind a team of rain-drops
+and leapt into the cistern of a handsome
+house at the west end of London.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Nephelo found the water in the cistern
+greatly vexed at riotous behaviour on the
+part of a large number of animalcules. He
+was told that Water-Drops had been compelled
+to come into that place, after undergoing
+many hardships, and had unavoidably brought
+with them germs of these annoying creatures.
+Time and place favouring, nothing could
+hinder them from coming into life; the
+cistern was their cradle, although many of
+them were already anything but babes.
+Hereupon, Nephelo himself was dashed at by
+an ugly little fellow like a dragon, but an
+uglier fellow, who might be a small Saint
+George, pounced at the dragon, and the heart
+of the poor fairy was the scene of contest.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>After a while, there was an arrival of fresh
+water from a pipe, the flow of which stirred
+up the anger of some decomposing growth
+which lined the sides and bottom of the
+cistern. So there was a good deal of confusion
+caused, and it was some time before all
+parties settled down into their proper places.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“The sun is very hot,” said Nephelo. “We
+all seem to be getting very warm.” “Yes,
+indeed,” said a Lady-Drop; “it’s not like the
+cool Cloud-Country. I have been poisoned in
+the Thames, half filtered, and made frowsy
+by standing, this July weather, in an open
+reservoir. I’ve travelled in pipes laid too
+near the surface to be cool, and now am spoiling
+here. I know if water is not cold it can’t
+be pleasant.” “Ah,” said an old Drop, with a
+small eel in one of his eyes; “I don’t wonder
+at hearing tell that men drink wine, and tea,
+and beer.” “Talking of beer,” said another,
+“is it a fact that we’re of no use to the
+brewers? Our character’s so bad, they can’t
+rely on us for cooling the worts, and so sink
+wells, in order to brew all the year round with
+water cold enough to suit their purposes.”
+“I know nothing of beer,” said Nephelo;
+“but I know that if the gentlemen and ladies
+in this cistern were as cold as they could wish
+to be, there wouldn’t be so much decomposition
+going on amongst them.” “Your turn
+in, Sir,” said a polite Drop, and Nephelo leapt
+nimbly through the place of exit into a china
+jug placed ready to receive him. He was
+conveyed across a handsome kitchen by a
+cook, who declared her opinion that the
+morning’s rain had caused the drains to smell
+uncommonly. Nephelo then was thrown into
+a kettle.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Boiling is to an unclean Water-Drop, like
+scratching to a bear, a pleasant operation.
+It gets rid of the little animals by which it
+had been bitten, and throws down some of the
+impurity with which it had been soiled. So,
+after boiling, water becomes more pure, but
+it is, at the same time, more greedy than ever
+to absorb extraneous matter. Therefore, the
+sons of men who boil their vitiated water
+ought to keep it covered afterwards, and if
+they wish to drink it cold, should lose no time
+in doing so. Nephelo and his friends within
+the kettle danced with delight under the boiling
+process. Chattering pleasantly together,
+they compared notes of their adventures upon
+earth, discussed the politics of Cloud-Land, and
+although it took them nearly twice as long to
+boil as it would have done had there been no
+carbonate of lime about them, they were quite
+sorry when the time was come for them to
+part. Nephelo then, with many others, was
+poured out into an urn. So he was taken to
+the drawing-room, a hot iron having, in a
+friendly manner, been put down his back, to
+keep him boiling.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Out of the urn into the tea-pot; out of the
+tea-pot into the slop-basin; Nephelo had only
+time to remark a matron tea-maker, young
+ladies knitting, and a good-looking young
+gentleman upon his legs, laying the law down
+with a tea-spoon, before he (the fairy, not the
+gentleman) was smothered with a plate of
+muffins. From so much of the conversation as
+Nephelo could catch, filtered through muffin,
+it appeared that they were talking about tea.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“It’s all very well for you to say, mother,
+that you’re confident you make tea very good,
+but I ask—no, there I see you put six
+spoonfuls in for five of us. Mother, if this
+were not hard water—(here there was a noise
+as of a spoon hammering upon the iron)—two
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_486'>486</span>spoonsful less would make tea of a better
+flavour and of equal strength. Now, there
+are three hundred and sixty-five times and a
+quarter tea-times in the year——”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“And how many spoonfuls, brother, to the
+quarter of a tea-time?”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Maria, you’ve no head for figures. I say
+nothing of the tea consumed at breakfast.
+Multiply——”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“My dear boy, you have left school; no one
+asks you to multiply. Hand me the muffin.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Nephelo, released, was unable to look about
+him, owing to the high walls of the slop-basin
+which surrounded him on every side. The
+room was filled with pleasant sunset light,
+but Nephelo soon saw the coming shadow of
+the muffin-plate, and all was dark directly
+afterwards.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Take cooking, mother. M. Soyer<a id='r5'></a><a href='#f5' class='c006'><sup>[5]</sup></a> says
+you can’t boil many vegetables properly in
+London water. Greens won’t be green; French
+beans are tinged with yellow, and peas shrivel.
+It don’t open the pores of meat, and make it
+succulent, as softer water does. M. Soyer
+believes that the true flavour of meat cannot
+be extracted with hard water. Bread does not
+rise so well when made with it. Horses——”</p>
+
+<div class='footnote' id='f5'>
+<p class='c005'><a href='#r5'>5</a>. Evidence before the Board of Health.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>“My dear boy, M. Soyer don’t cook horses.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Horses, Dr. Playfair tells us, sheep, and
+pigeons will refuse hard water if they can get
+it soft, though from the muddiest pool. Racehorses,
+when carried to a place where the water
+is notoriously hard, have a supply of softer water
+carried with them to preserve their good condition.
+Not to speak of gripes, hard water
+will assuredly produce what people call a
+staring coat.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Ah, no doubt, then, it was London water
+that created Mr. Blossomley’s blue swallowtail.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Maria, you make nonsense out of everything.
+When you are Mrs. Blossomley——”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Now pass my cup.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>There was a pause and a clatter. Presently
+the muffin-plate was lifted, and four times
+in succession there were black dregs thrown
+into the face of Nephelo. After the perpetration
+of these insults he was once again condemned
+to darkness.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“When you are Mrs. Blossomley, Maria,”
+so the voice went on, “when you are Mrs.
+Blossomley, you will appreciate what I am
+now going to tell you about washerwomen.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Couldn’t you postpone it, dear, until I am
+able to appreciate it. You promised to take
+us to Rachel to-night.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Ah!” said another girlish voice, “you’ll
+not escape. We dress at seven. Until then—for
+the next twelve minutes you may speak.
+Bore on, we will endure.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“As for you, Catherine, Maria teaches you,
+I see, to chatter. But if Mrs. B. would object
+to the reception of a patent mangle as a
+wedding present from her brother, she had
+better hear him now. Washerwoman’s work
+is not a thing to overlook, I tell you. Before
+a shirt is worn out, there will have been spent
+upon it five times its intrinsic value in the
+washing-tub. The washing of clothes costs
+more, by a great deal, than the clothes themselves.
+The yearly cost of washing to a
+household of the middle class amounts, on
+the average, to about a third part of the
+rental, or a twelfth part of the total income.
+Among the poor, the average expense of
+washing will more probably be half the rental
+if they wash at home, but not more than a
+fourth of it if they employ the Model Wash-houses.
+The weekly cost of washing to a poor
+man averages certainly not less than fourpence
+halfpenny. Small tradesmen, driven to
+economise in linen, spend perhaps not more
+than ninepence; in the middle and the upper
+classes, the cost weekly varies from a shilling
+to five shillings for each person, and amounts
+very often to a larger sum. On these grounds
+Mr. Bullar, Honorary Secretary to the Association
+for Promoting Baths and Wash-houses,
+estimates the washing expenditure of
+London at a shilling a week for each inhabitant,
+or, for the whole, five millions of
+pounds yearly. Professor Clark—”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“My dear Professor Tom, you have consumed
+four of your twelve minutes.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Professor Clark judges from such estimates
+as can be furnished by the trade, that the
+consumption of soap in London is fifteen
+pounds to each person per annum—twice as
+much as is employed in other parts of England.
+That quantity of soap costs six-and-eightpence;
+water, per head, costs half as much,
+or three-and-fourpence; or each man’s soap
+and water costs, throughout London, on an
+average, ten shillings for twelve months. If
+the hardness of the water be diminished, there
+is a diminution in the want of soap. For
+every grain of carbonate of lime dissolved in
+each gallon of any water, Mr. Donaldson
+declares, two ounces of soap more for a hundred
+gallons of that water are required.
+Every such grain is called a degree of hardness.
+Water of five degrees of hardness
+requires, for example, two ounces of soap;
+water of eight degrees of hardness then will
+need fifteen; and water of sixteen degrees
+will demand thirty-two. Sixteen degrees,
+Maria, is the hardness of Thames Water—of
+the water, mother, which has poached upon
+your tea-caddy. You see, then, that when we
+pay for the soap we use at the rate of six-and-eightpence
+each, since the unusual hardness
+of our water causes us to use a double quantity,
+every man in London pays at an average
+rate of three-and-fourpence a year his tax for
+a hard water, through the cost of soap alone.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Now you must finish in five minutes,
+brother Tom.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“But soap is not the only matter that concerns
+the washerwoman and her customers.
+There is labour also, and the wear and tear;
+there is a double amount of destruction to
+our linen, involved in the double time of
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_487'>487</span>rubbing and the double soaping, which hard
+water compels washerwomen to employ. So
+that, when all things have been duly reckoned
+up in our account, we find that the outlay
+caused by the necessities for washing linen in
+a town supplied like London with exceedingly
+hard water, is four times greater than it would
+be if soft water were employed. The cost of
+washing, as I told you, has been estimated at
+five millions a year. So that, if these calculations
+be correct, more than three millions of
+money, nearly four millions, is the amount
+filched yearly from the Londoners by their
+hard water through the wash-tub only. To
+that sum, Mrs. Blossomley, being of a respectable
+family and very partial to clean
+linen, will contribute of course much more
+than her average proportion.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Well, Mr. Orator, I was not listening to
+all you said, but what I heard I do think
+much exaggerated.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“I take it, sister, from the Government
+Report; oblige me by believing half of it, and
+still the case is strong. It is quite time for
+people to be stirring.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“So it is, I declare. Your twelve minutes
+are spent, and we will always be ready for the
+play. If you talk there of water, I will shriek.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Here there arose a chatter which Nephelo
+found to be about matters that, unlike the
+water topic, did not at all interest himself.
+There was a rustle and a movement; and a
+creaking noise approached the drawing-room,
+which Nephelo discovered presently to be
+caused by Papa’s boots as he marched upstairs
+after his post-prandial slumberings.
+There was more talk uninteresting to the
+fairy; Nephelo, therefore, became drowsy;
+his drowsiness might at the Same time have
+been aggravated by the close confinement he
+experienced in an unwholesome atmosphere
+beneath the muffin-plate. He was aroused
+by a great clattering; this the maid caused
+who was carrying him down stairs upon a
+tray with all the other tea-things.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>From a sweet dream of nuptials with
+Cirrha, Nephelo was awakened to the painful
+consciousness that he had not yet succeeded
+in effecting any great good for the human
+race; he had but rinsed a tea-pot. With
+a faint impulse of hope the desponding
+fairy noticed that the slop-basin in which
+he sate was lifted from the tray, in a few
+minutes after the tray had been deposited
+upon the kitchen-dresser. Pity poor Nephelo!
+By a remorseless scullery-maid he was dashed
+rudely from the basin into a trough of stone,
+from which he tumbled through a hole placed
+there on purpose to engulf him,—tumbled
+through into a horrible abyss.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>This abyss was a long dungeon running
+from back to front beneath the house, built
+of bricks—rotten now, and saturated with
+moisture. Some of the bricks had fallen in,
+or crumbled into nothingness; and Nephelo
+saw that the soil without the dungeon was
+quite wet.  The dungeon-floor was coated
+with pollutions, travelled over by a sluggish
+shallow stream, with which the fairy floated.
+The whole dungeon’s atmosphere was foul
+and poisonous. Nephelo found now what
+those exhalations were which rose through
+every opening in the house, through vent-holes
+and the burrowings of rats; for rats
+and other vermin tenanted this noisome den.
+This was the pestilential gallery called by
+the good people of the house, their drain. A
+trap-door at one end confined the fairy in this
+place with other Water-Drops, until there
+should be collected a sufficient body of them
+to negotiate successfully for egress.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>The object of this door was to prevent the
+ingress of much more foul matter from without;
+and its misfortune was, that in so doing
+it necessarily pent up a concentrated putrid
+gas within. At length Nephelo escaped; but
+alas! it was from a Newgate to a Bastille—from
+the drain into the sewer. This was a
+long vaulted prison running near the surface
+underneath the street. Shaken by the passage
+overhead of carriages, not a few bricks had
+fallen in; and Nephelo hurrying forward,
+wholly possessed by the one thought—could
+he escape?—fell presently into a trap. An
+oyster-shell had fixed itself upright between
+two bricks unevenly jointed together; much
+solid filth had grown around it; and in this
+Nephelo was caught. Here he remained for
+a whole month, during which time he saw
+many floods of water pass him, leaving himself
+with a vast quantity of obstinate encrusted
+filth unmoved. At the month’s end
+there came some men to scrape, and sweep,
+and cleanse; then with a sudden flow of
+water, Nephelo was forced along, and presently,
+with a large number of emancipated foulnesses,
+received his discharge from prison,
+and was let loose upon the River Thames.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Nephelo struck against a very dirty Drop.
+“Keep off, will you?” the Drop exclaimed.
+“You are not fit to touch a person, sewer-bird.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Why, where are you from, my sweet
+gentleman?”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Oh! I? I’ve had a turn through some
+Model Drains. Tubular drains, they call ’em.
+Look at me; isn’t that clear?”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“There’s nothing clear about you,” replied
+Nephelo. “What do you mean by Model
+Drains?”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“I mean I’ve come from Upper George
+Street through a twelve-inch pipe four or five
+times faster than one travels over an old
+sewer-bed; travelled express, no stoppage.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Indeed!”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Yes. Impermeable, earthenware, tubular
+pipes, accurately dove-tailed. I come from
+an experimental district. When it’s all
+settled, there’s to be water on at high pressure
+everywhere, and an earthenware drain
+pipe under every tap, a tube of no more than
+the necessary size. Then these little pipes
+are to run down the earth; and there’s not
+to be a great brick drain running underneath
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_488'>488</span>each house into the street; the pipes run
+into a larger tube of earthenware that is to
+be laid at the backs of all the houses; these
+tubes run into larger ones, but none of them
+very monstrous; and so that there is a constant
+flow, like circulation of the blood; and
+all the pipes are to run at last into one
+large conduit, which is to run out of town
+with all the sewage matter and discharge so
+far down the Thames, that no return tide ever
+can bring it back to London. Some is to go
+branching off into the fields to be manure.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Humph!” said Nephelo. “You profess to
+be very clever. How do you know all this?”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Know? Bless you, I’m a regular old
+Thames Drop I’ve been in the cisterns, in
+the tumblers, down the sewers, in the river,
+up the pipes, in the reservoirs, in the cisterns,
+in the teapots, down the sewers, in the river,
+up the pipes, in the reservoirs, in the cisterns,
+in the saucepans, down the sewers, in the
+Thames—”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Hold! Stop there now!” said Nephelo.
+“Well, so you have heard a great deal in
+your lifetime. You’ve had some adventures,
+doubtless?”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“I believe you,” said the Cockney-Drop.
+“The worst was when I was pumped once as
+fresh water into Rotherhithe. That place is
+below high-water mark; so are Bermondsey
+and St. George’s, Southwark. Newington,
+St. Olave’s, Westminster, and Lambeth, are
+but little better. Well, you know, drains of
+the old sort always leak, and there’s a great
+deal more water poured into London than
+the Londoners have stowage room for, so the
+water in low districts can’t pass off at high
+water, and there ’s a precious flood. We
+sopped the ground at Rotherhithe, but I
+thought I never should escape again.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Will the new pipes make any difference
+to that?”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Yes; so I am led to understand. They
+are to be laid with a regular fall, to pass the
+water off, which, being constant, will be never
+in excess. The fall will be to a point of
+course below the water level, and at a convenient
+place the contents of these drains are
+to be pumped up into the main sewer. Horrible
+deal of death caused, Sir, by the damp
+in those low districts. One man in thirty-seven
+died of cholera in Rotherhithe last
+year, when in Clerkenwell, at sixty-three feet
+above high water, there died but one in five
+hundred and thirty. The proportion held
+throughout.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Ah, by the bye, you have heard, of course,
+complainings of the quality of water. Will
+the Londoners sink wells for themselves?”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Wells! What a child you are! Just
+from the clouds, I see. Wells in a large
+town get horribly polluted. They propose to
+consolidate and improve two of the best
+Thames Water Companies, the Grand
+Junction and Vauxhall, for the supply of
+London, until their great scheme can be introduced;
+and to maintain them afterwards
+as a reserve guard in case their great scheme
+shouldn’t prove so triumphant as they think
+it will be.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“What is this great scheme, I should like
+to know?”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Why, they talk of fetching rain-water
+from a tract of heath between Bagshot and
+Farnham. The rain there soaks through a
+thin crust of growing herbage, which is the
+only perfect filter, chemical as well as mechanical—the
+living rootlets extract more
+than we can, where impurity exists. Then,
+Sir, the rain runs into a large bed of siliceous
+sand, placed over marl; below the marl there
+is siliceous sand again—Ah, I perceive you
+are not geological.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Go on.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“The sand, washed by the rains of ages,
+holds the water without soiling it more than
+a glass tumbler would, and the Londoners
+say that in this way, by making artificial
+channels and a big reservoir, they can collect
+twenty-eight thousand gallons a day of water
+nearly pure. They require forty thousand
+gallons, and propose to get the rest in the
+same neighbourhood from tributaries of the
+River Wey, not quite so pure, but only half as
+hard, as Thames water, and unpolluted.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“How is it to get to London?”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Through a covered aqueduct. Covered
+for coolness’ sake, and cleanliness. Then it
+is to be distributed through earthenware
+pipes, laid rather deep, again for coolness’
+sake in the first instance, but for cleanliness
+as well. The water is to come in at high
+pressure, and run in iron or lead pipes up
+every house, scale every wall. There is to be
+a tap in every room, and under every tap
+there is to be the entrance to a drain pipe.
+Where water supply ends, drainage begins.
+They are to be the two halves of a single
+system. Furthermore, there are to be numbers
+of plugs opening in every street, and
+streets and courts are to be washed out every
+morning, or every other morning, as the
+traffic may require, with hose and jet. The
+Great Metropolis mustn’t be dirty, or be content
+with rubbing a finger here and there
+over its dirt. It is to have its face washed
+every morning, just before the hours of
+business. The water at high pressure is to
+set people’s invention at work upon the introduction
+of hydraulic apparatus for cranes,
+et cætera, which now cause much hand labour
+and are scarcely worth steam-power. Furthermore——”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“My dear friend,” cried Nephelo, “you
+are too clever. More than half of what you
+say is unintelligible to me,”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“But the grand point,” continued the
+garrulous Thames drop, “is the expense.
+The saving of cisterns, ball-cocks, plumbers’
+bills, expansive sewer-works, constant repairs,
+hand labour, street sweeping, soap, tea, linen,
+fuel, steam-boilers now damaged by incrustation,
+boards, salaries, doctors’ bills, time,
+parish rates——”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><span class='pageno' id='Page_489'>489</span>The catalogue was never ended, for the
+busy Drop was suddenly entangled among
+hair upon the corpse of a dead cat, which
+fate also the fairy narrowly escaped, to be
+in the next minute sucked up as Nubis had
+been sucked, through pipes into a reservoir.
+Weary with the incessant chattering of his
+conceited friend, whose pride he trusted that
+a night with puss might humble, Nephelo
+now lurked silent in a corner. In a dreamy
+state he floated with the current underground,
+and was half sleeping in a pipe under some
+London street, when a great noise of trampling
+overhead, mingled with cries, awakened him.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“What is the matter now?” the fairy cried.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“A fire, no doubt, to judge by the noise,”
+said a neighbour quietly. Nephelo panted
+now with triumph. Cirrha was before his
+eyes. Now he could benefit the race of man.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Let us get out,” cried Nephelo; “let us
+assist in running to the rescue.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Don’t be impatient,” said a drowsy Drop.
+“We can’t get out of here till they have found
+the Company’s turncock, and then he must go
+to this plug and that plug in one street, and
+another, before we are turned off.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“In the meantime the fire——”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Will burn the house down. Help in five
+minutes would save a house. Now the luckiest
+man will seldom have his premises attended
+to in less than twenty.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Nephelo thought here was another topic for
+his gossip in the Thames. The plugs talked
+of with a constant water supply would take
+the sting out of the Fire-Fiend.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Presently, among confused movements, confused
+sounds, amid a rush of water, Nephelo
+burst into the light—into the vivid light of a
+great fire that leapt and roared as Nephelo
+was dashed against it! Through the red
+flames and the black smoke in a burst of
+steam, the fairy reascended hopeless to the
+clouds.</p>
+
+<h3 class='c009'>CHAPTER THE FOURTH.</h3>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c0'>
+<div class='nf-center c008'>
+    <div>Rascally Conduct of the Prince of Nimbus.</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>The Prince of Nimbus, whose goodnature
+we have celebrated, was not good for nothing.
+Having graciously permitted all the suitors of
+the Princess Cirrha to go down to earth and
+labour for her hand, he took advantage of
+their absence, and, having the coast clear,
+importuned the daughter of King Cumulus
+with his own addresses. Cirrha was not disposed
+to listen to them, but the rogue her
+father was ambitious. He desired to make
+a good alliance, and that object was better
+gained by intermarriage with a prince than
+with a subject. “There will be an uproar,”
+said the old man, “when those fellows down
+below come back. They will look black and
+no doubt storm a little, but we’ll have our
+royal marriage notwithstanding.” So the
+Prince of Nimbus married Cirrha, and
+Nephelo arrived at the court of King Cumulus
+one evening during the celebration of the
+bridal feast. His wrath was seen on earth in
+many parts of England in the shape of a
+great thunderstorm on the 16th of July. The
+adventures of the other suitors, they being
+thus cheated of their object, need not be
+detailed. As each returns he will be made
+acquainted with the scandalous fraud practised
+by the Prince of Nimbus, and this being the
+state of politics in Cloud-Land at the moment
+when we go to press, we may fairly expect to
+witness five or six more thunderstorms before
+next winter. Each suitor, as he returns and
+finds how shamefully he has been cheated,
+will create a great disturbance; and no
+wonder. Conduct so rascally as that of the
+Prince of Nimbus is enough to fill the clouds
+with uproar.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c003'>A CHRISTIAN BROTHERHOOD.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c004'>There is an establishment in Paris, for
+providing instruction for artisans of all ages
+and others employed during the day, which is
+well worthy of imitation in this country.
+It has occasioned the establishment, in all parts
+of France, of a number of evening schools, at
+which instruction is given without charge to
+the pupil. We are by no means clear that in
+this respect a sound principle is observed;
+holding it to be important that those who
+<i>can</i> pay anything for the great advantages of
+education should pay something, however
+little. But into this question we do not now
+propose to enter.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>The institution was originated in 1680, by
+Dr. J. Baptiste de la Lulli, Canon of Rheims,
+lingered on till 1804, but was revived and
+brought to its present condition of efficacy in
+1830. It consists of a parent or training
+establishment in Paris (Rue Plumet, 33)
+from which teachers are provided for any
+locality, in any part of France, or even Italy,
+for which an evening school may be petitioned
+by the residents. There are connected with
+it at present no fewer than five thousand
+teachers, who call themselves “Brothers of
+the Christian Schools” (<i><span lang="fr">Frères des Ecoles
+Chrétiennes</span></i>). Four thousand are employed
+in France, and one thousand in Italy. They
+are not a Church, but a Lay Community (<i><span lang="fr">Religieux
+laïques</span></i>). A certain number remain
+ready at the central establishment to obey
+any call that may be made for their services.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Before such a requisition is made, the
+municipal authorities, or any number of
+benevolent individuals who may choose to
+subscribe, must have provided a house and
+school-room, with all proper accommodations,
+and must certify that a certain number
+of pupils are willing to enrol themselves.
+On application to the central establishment
+three qualified Christian Brothers are sent
+down, at salaries not exceeding six hundred
+francs, or twenty-four pounds per annum
+in the provinces, or thirty pounds a year
+in Paris. Fewer than three Frères are
+not allowed to superintend each school; two
+for the classes, and a probationer to perform
+the household duties; but, when the schools
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_490'>490</span>outgrow the management of that number a
+fourth is added, to take the management of
+the whole, and is called a <i><span lang="fr">Frère-directeur</span></i>.
+The classes are limited to sixty for writing,
+and one hundred for other branches of education.
+This limitation is necessary, because
+the monitorial system is not followed, and
+the whole weight of the duties falls on the
+masters.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>The schools thus established in the various
+quarters of Paris are very numerous; six
+thousand apprentices and artisans attend them
+after their hours of work—young boys, youths,
+and adults—the numbers having declined
+since the revolution of 1848. “I have,” says
+Mr. Seymour Tremenheere, in a note to his
+Report on the state of the mining population,
+“at different times visited some of those evening
+schools in the Fauxbourgs St. Antoine
+and St. Martin, containing from four hundred
+to six hundred, in separate class-rooms of
+sixty to a hundred each, all well lighted,
+warmed, and ventilated. The gentle and
+affectionate manner of the Frères, and their
+skill in teaching, were very conspicuous, and
+sufficiently explained their success. The instruction
+consists, in addition to the doctrines
+of Christianity, which are the basis of the
+whole, of reading, writing, arithmetic, a little
+history, drawing (linear and perspective), and
+vocal music. In all the classes, many adults
+who had been at work all day were to be
+seen mixed with young men and boys, patiently
+learning to read, or to write and cypher. In the
+drawing-classes, some were copying ornamental
+designs, or heads, for their own amusement;
+others, to improve themselves as cabinetmakers,
+or workers in bronze, or in other
+trades for which some cultivation of taste is
+requisite.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>The superiority of the system of teaching
+adopted by the Christian Brothers has been
+proved by a severe test. In Paris, as in
+London, it is the custom, once a year, to
+assemble all the parochial schools; not, however,
+as a mere show for the purpose of
+uniting in ill-executed psalmody, but with the
+better and more useful view of testing the improvement
+of the scholars, and of ascertaining
+the degrees of diligence and proficiency attained
+by the masters. The parochial scholars
+compete for prizes, given by the corporation
+of the city; not only among themselves, but
+with the other elementary schools—those of
+the Christian Brothers among the rest. At
+these competitions, it has happened, of late
+years, that the pupils of the latter have been
+the victors. In one year, they gained seventeen
+prizes out of twenty; in another, twenty-three
+out of thirty-one; and, last year, they
+carried off the highest forty-two prizes: the
+fortunate candidates of all the other schools
+only claiming the inferior rewards. In addition
+to these evening schools for adults and young
+men who are already gaining their livelihood,
+the Frères Chrétiens have set on foot Sunday
+evening sermons at different churches, and
+also meetings for lectures on religious and
+moral subjects adapted to the wants of, and
+calculated to influence, the same class. “I
+recently was present at one of these meetings
+in the Faubourg St. Antoine” (we quote our
+former authority),  “where a series of eloquent
+and forcible addresses was delivered—one, by
+a Professor of History, on some of the leading
+points of Christian morals; another, by a
+gentleman of literary attainments, on Death
+and a future state; a third, by a gentleman of
+independent position, on the religious condition
+of some of the forçats at Toulon; a
+fourth, by a member of the university, on the
+displacement of labour by machinery, and its
+ultimate advantage to the labourer; all of
+whom had come forward to aid in the task of
+combating irreligion, and the various forms of
+error pervading the minds of so many of the
+working classes of Paris. These were followed
+by hymns, and by prayers. A deep sense of
+religion is, indeed, the animating spirit of all
+the endeavours of the Frères Chrétiens for
+the benefit of the lower classes, and the principle
+which sustains them in their self-denying
+and arduous career.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>The lovers of “great comprehensive systems,”—to
+whom we adverted in a former page—might,
+by copying the plan of the French
+Christian Brothers, carry out a scheme which
+would be of the utmost use in this country.
+It would also have the advantage of encouraging
+small beginnings, and combining them
+into one great and efficacious whole. We can
+hardly wait until the present adult generation
+of ignorance shall die out to be succeeded by
+another which we are, after all, only half educating.
+Why not offer inducements, and form
+plans, for the instruction of grown-up persons,
+many of whom, having come to a sense of their
+deficiencies, pine for culture and enlightenment,
+which they cannot obtain? A central
+establishment in London—on a general plan
+somewhat similar to the Government Normal
+Schools already in existence, but with less
+cumbrous and costly machinery—could be
+formed at a small expense; and we doubt not
+that many a knot of benevolent well-wishers
+would, in their various localities, be eager to
+provide all the scholastic <i><span lang="fr">matériel</span></i> for the less
+favoured artisans and day-workers around
+them, could they look with confidence to some
+central establishment for the formation of
+teachers, in which they could place implicit
+confidence.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>The monitorial system, in a school consisting
+of all ages—in which a small boy, from his
+intellectual superiority, might be placed over
+the heads of pupils, greater, older than himself—is
+manifestly impracticable; and a larger
+number of teachers than is usual in schools
+for children only, would be necessary.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>We will borrow from Mr. Tremenheere a
+comparison between the intellectual acquirements
+and moral conduct of French workmen
+and those of English workmen, in the mining
+districts of each country. We do not assume
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_491'>491</span>that the superiority of the French workmen
+has been occasioned solely by the evening
+schools of the Christian Brothers, but, after
+what we have already shown, we consider it
+reasonable to infer that, since 1830, those
+establishments have had a large share in the
+formation of their character. In a former
+report,<a id='r6'></a><a href='#f6' class='c006'><sup>[6]</sup></a> Mr. Tremenheere described the habits
+and manners of the French colliers and miners,
+especially those at the iron and coal-works in
+the coalfield near Valenciennes. He was
+compelled, by the force of unexceptionable
+evidence, to show how superior they were in
+every respect, except that of mere animal
+power, to the generality of the mining population
+in this country. At the large iron-works
+at Denain, employing about four thousand
+people, there were thirty Englishmen from
+Staffordshire. These men were earning about
+one-third more wages than the French
+labourers; but, they spent all they earned
+in eating and drinking; were frequently
+drunk; and in their manners were coarse,
+quarrelsome, disrespectful, and insubordinate.
+The English manager—who had held for
+many years responsible situations under
+some of the leading iron-masters in Staffordshire—stated
+with regret, that so different
+and so superior were the intelligence, and
+the civilised habits and conduct, of the French,
+that, if any thirty Frenchmen from these
+works were to go to work in Staffordshire,
+“they would be so disgusted, they would not
+stay; they would think they had got among
+a savage race.”</p>
+
+<div class='footnote' id='f6'>
+<p class='c005'><a href='#r6'>6</a>. “Report of Inspection of French and Belgian mines,
+1848—Appendix.”</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>There have been, lately, forty Frenchmen
+employed at one of the large manufactories in
+Staffordshire, by the Messrs. Chance, at their
+extensive and well-known glass-works at West
+Bromwich, in the immediate neighbourhood
+of some of the great iron-works. Mr. Chance
+gives the Commissioner the following account
+of these men:—“A few years ago, we brought
+over forty Frenchmen to teach our men a
+particular process in our manufacture. They
+have now nearly all returned. We found
+them very steady, quiet, temperate men. They
+earned good wages, and saved while they were
+with us a good deal of money. We have had
+as much as fifteen hundred pounds at a time
+in our hands belonging to these men, which
+we transmitted to France for them. One of
+them, who sometimes earns as much as seven
+pounds a week, has saved in our service not
+much short of four thousand pounds. He is
+with us now. He is a glass-blower. We have
+about fourteen hundred men in our employ
+(in the glass-blowing and alkali works) when
+trade is in a good state. I am sorry to say
+that the contrast between them and the
+Frenchmen was very marked in many respects,
+especially in that of forethought and
+economy. I do not think that, while we had
+in our hands the large sum mentioned above
+as the savings of the Frenchmen at one time,
+we have had at the same time five pounds
+belonging to our own people. They generally
+spend their money as fast as they can
+get it.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>In Scotland, evening schools abound, and
+come in effectually to aid the universal system
+of primary instruction existing over that
+part of our island. A Wesleyan local preacher
+told Mr. Tremenheere of the Scotchmen employed
+on the Northumberland and Durham
+collieries, “when you go into some of the
+Scotchmen’s houses, you would be surprised
+to see the books they have—not many, but
+all choice books. Some of their favourite
+authors in divinity are very common among
+them. Many of them read such books as
+Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and
+are fond of discussing the subjects he treats
+of. They also read the lives of statesmen,
+and books of history; also works on logic;
+and, sometimes, mathematics. Such men can
+be reasoned with about anything appertaining
+to their calling, and they know very
+well why wages cannot be at particular times
+higher than a certain standard. They see at
+once, by the price current in the market,
+what is the fair portion to go to the workman
+as wages, according to the circumstances
+of the pit and the general state of the
+trade. Such men will have nothing to do
+with the union. They scorn to read such
+penny and twopenny publications as we have
+been talking about. They are fonder of sitting
+down after their work and reading a
+chapter of the Wealth of Nations. They will
+also talk with great zest of many of their
+great men—their own countrymen, who have
+raised themselves by their own industry.
+There are, undoubtedly, some men that come
+out of Scotland bad men, but these are not
+informed men. I am speaking of all this
+neighbourhood, where I have lived all my life.
+There are a great many Scotch at all the
+collieries here, and most of them very respectable
+men, exceedingly so. You may ask me
+why the union is so strong in parts of Scotland—as
+in Lanarkshire? It is because in
+Lanarkshire the pitmen are one-third Irish,
+and many of the worst Scotch from other
+counties. Those who come here are among the
+best in their own country, I should think,
+from the accounts they give me. When a
+Scotchman comes here he earns English
+wages; but he does not spend them as an
+Englishman does. A Scotchman often, rather
+than lose buying a good book, will lose his
+dinner. The Scotchwomen begin to keep
+their houses cleaner after they get into
+England, and by degrees they come to
+keep them as clean as the Englishwomen;
+and the first generation after their fathers
+come are equal to the English in their wish to
+keep everything clean about them. They are
+generally very saving, and lay out the over-plus
+of their earnings in books and furniture
+or lay it by. They have a great disposition
+to have their children well taught. Indeed,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_492'>492</span>I have seen several lads that have been
+educated in the Scotch schools, and I find
+them very well taught; they can reason like
+men.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“I don’t think I ever saw Adam Smith’s
+works in more than one or two English pit-men’s
+houses. They are backward to attempt
+anything that requires steady thinking, such
+as that book, or any work on logic or mathematics.
+The Scotch often study both.
+This makes one of the great differences
+between the best working-men of the two
+people. The English seldom attempt even
+English grammar or geometry; they always
+tell me they are obliged to give way when they
+have made a trial.<a id='r7'></a><a href='#f7' class='c006'><sup>[7]</sup></a> They had rather read any
+popular work, such as the ‘Christian Philosopher,’
+the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ or Walter
+Scott’s novels. They love to read their
+country’s history, and they like to talk of its
+renown in the ancient French wars of Edward
+the Third and Henry the Fifth. They are
+also great readers of Napoleon’s and the Duke
+of Wellington’s wars, and their soul seems to
+take fire when they talk of their country’s
+victories. They are fond of biography, and
+especially that of men who rose from being
+poor men to be great characters. They are
+very generous in their dispositions, and will
+share their loaf with the poor, as all the
+beggars and trampers from Newcastle and all
+the country know. They are greatly improved
+in my time as to drinking habits; there is
+much less of it, and their money is chiefly
+spent in living well and making a great show
+in furniture and dress. The women, too, are
+improving, and manage their families much
+better than they used to do. The English
+pit-boys are exceedingly quick at school—much
+more so than the Scotch, I think. What
+I most want to see is better descriptions of
+schools—schools under masters of ability, who
+can teach their boys to think and reason.
+You will find boys who have been at such
+schools as most of those we have now, that
+can write a good hand and do some cyphering;
+but when you come to ask them questions
+that exercise the mind, they have no idea
+what to answer. If there were such schools
+for the boys, the men would soon be a different
+race; for what the men want is to be
+taught to exercise their reason fairly, which
+would prevent their being led away as they
+are now.”</p>
+
+<div class='footnote' id='f7'>
+<p class='c005'><a href='#r7'>7</a>. We doubt the <i>general</i> applicability of this description,
+without questioning its correctness in this case.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>With a little modification, this description
+of the pitman applies, in its more favourable
+characteristics, to the English operative generally.
+No one can read it without being
+convinced that there is sound and hopeful
+material, in the generous English character
+to work upon. The natural ability, the deep
+feeling, the quickness of perception, the susceptibility
+to religious and moral impressions,
+the sound common sense where the rudest
+cultivation has been attained, and the heartfelt
+patriotism, of the humble orders of this
+country, are unequalled in the world. Surely
+this is a rich mine to work; surely it should
+not be left to unskilled workers, or to chance;
+but should be faithfully confided to the heads
+and hearts of men, trained up to its improvement,
+as to a noble calling, and a solemn
+duty! In all parts of this land, the people
+are willing and desirous to be taught. Open
+schools anywhere, and they will come—even,
+as the Ragged Schools have proved, out of the
+worst dens of vice and infamy, in the worst
+hiding-places, in the worst towns and cities.
+But, unless the art of teaching is pursued
+upon a system, as an art, thoroughly understood,
+and proceeding on sound principles, the
+best intentions and the most sincere devotion
+can do next to nothing. For want of competent
+teachers, there are opportunities being
+lost at this moment, we do not hesitate to
+say, in the Ragged Schools of London alone,
+the waste of which, is of more true importance
+to the community, than all the theological
+controversies that ever deafened its ears, and
+distracted its wits. Meanwhile, the sands of
+Time are running out remorselessly, and, with
+every grain, immortal souls are perishing.
+We want teachers, competent to educate the
+mind, to rouse the reason, to undo the beastly
+transformation that has been effected—to our
+guilt and shame—upon humanity, and to bring
+God’s image out of the condition of the lower
+animals. What we have suffered to be beaten
+out of shape, we must remould, with pains,
+and care, and skill, and cannot hope to put
+into its rightful form hap-hazard. And such
+would be the glorious office and main usefulness
+of a comprehensive, unsectarian—in
+short, Christian—Brotherhood in England.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c003'>AN EVERY DAY HERO.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b c012'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>“Tell us,” the children to their grandsire said,</div>
+      <div class='line'>“Some wondrous story! tell us of the wars,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Or one of those old ballads that you know</div>
+      <div class='line'>About the seven famous champions,</div>
+      <div class='line'>St. George, St. Denis, and the rest of them.</div>
+      <div class='line'>We have delight in those heroic stories,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And often tell them over to ourselves</div>
+      <div class='line'>And wish that there were heroes now-a-days.”</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>The old man smoked his pipe; the children urged</div>
+      <div class='line'>More eagerly their wish, athirst to know</div>
+      <div class='line'>Something about the great men of old times,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Deploring still that these degenerate days</div>
+      <div class='line'>Produced no heroes, and that now no poets</div>
+      <div class='line'>Made ballads that were worth the listening to.</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>The old man smiled and laid aside his pipe;</div>
+      <div class='line'>Then, gazing tenderly into their faces,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Said he would tell them of as great a hero</div>
+      <div class='line'>As any which the ballads chronicled—</div>
+      <div class='line'>The good old ballads which they loved so well.</div>
+      <div class='line'>“Once on a time,” said he, “there was a lad,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Whose name was John; his father was a gardener.</div>
+      <div class='line'>He had great skill in flowers even when a child;</div>
+      <div class='line'>And when his father died, he carried on</div>
+      <div class='line'>The gardener’s trade. One autumn night he found</div>
+      <div class='line'>A young man hiding in his garden-shed,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Haggard and foot-sore, wanting bread to eat;</div>
+      <div class='line'><span class='pageno' id='Page_493'>493</span>A fugitive who had escaped the law,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And being now discovered, prayed for mercy,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And told his tale so very touchingly</div>
+      <div class='line'>That the young gardener promised him a refuge,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And strictest secresy. For weeks and months</div>
+      <div class='line'>The stranger worked with him, receiving wages</div>
+      <div class='line'>As a hired labourer. Both were fine young men,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Well-grown, broad-chested, full of strength and mettle;</div>
+      <div class='line'>In outward seeming equal to each other,</div>
+      <div class='line'>But inwardly the two were different.</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>“The stranger, George, had not a gardening turn,</div>
+      <div class='line'>He was book-learned, and had a gift for figures,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And could talk well, which in itself was good;</div>
+      <div class='line'>But he was double-faced, and false as Judas,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Who did betray the Saviour with a kiss.</div>
+      <div class='line'>He had, in truth, been clerk to some great merchant,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Had wronged his trusting master, and had fled,</div>
+      <div class='line'>As I have said, from the pursuit of law.</div>
+      <div class='line'>Of this, however, John knew not a word,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Knew only that he had been in sore trouble,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And, for that cause, he strove to do him good;</div>
+      <div class='line'>And when he found him useless in his trade,</div>
+      <div class='line'>He introduced him to the Squire’s bailiff,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Whose daughter he had courted many a year.</div>
+      <div class='line'>This bailiff was a simple, honest man,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Who not designing evil, none suspected.</div>
+      <div class='line'>He found the stranger, clever, quick at reckoning,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Smart with his pen; a likely man of business;</div>
+      <div class='line'>And, therefore, on a luckless day for him,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Brought him before the Squire. Ere long he had</div>
+      <div class='line'>A place appointed him which gave him access</div>
+      <div class='line'>To the Squire daily; principles of honour</div>
+      <div class='line'>Were all unknown to him: all means allowable</div>
+      <div class='line'>Which served his ends. He gained a great ascendance</div>
+      <div class='line'>Over the Squire, and ere four years were passed,</div>
+      <div class='line'>He was appointed bailiff.</div>
+      <div class='line in34'>“The old bailiff</div>
+      <div class='line'>Was sent adrift, and the kind, worthy, Squire,</div>
+      <div class='line'>His thirty years’ employer, turned against him!</div>
+      <div class='line'>It was a villain’s act, first, to traduce,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And then supplant—it was a Judas-trick!</div>
+      <div class='line'>The gardener John, who wooed the bailiff’s daughter,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Had married her before this plotter’s work</div>
+      <div class='line'>Was come to light; and they, poor, simple folk,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Invited him among their wedding-company,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And he, with his black plots hatching within him,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Came, full of smiles, and ate and drank with them;</div>
+      <div class='line'>The double-faced villain! The old bailiff</div>
+      <div class='line'>Was turned adrift, as I have said already,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And his dismissal looked like a disgrace,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Although the Squire brought not a charge against him,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Except that he was old, and younger men</div>
+      <div class='line'>Could better carry out his modern plans!</div>
+      <div class='line'>And modern plans, God knows, they had enough!</div>
+      <div class='line'>Old tenants were removed; and soon a notice</div>
+      <div class='line'>Came to the gardener, John, that he must quit;</div>
+      <div class='line'>Must quit the little spot he loved so well,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And where the poor, heart-broken bailiff, found</div>
+      <div class='line'>A home in his distress. It mattered not</div>
+      <div class='line'>Their likings or convenience, go they must;</div>
+      <div class='line'>The Squire was laying out his place afresh—</div>
+      <div class='line'>Or the new bailiff, rather; and John’s garden</div>
+      <div class='line'>Was wanted for the fine new pleasure-grounds!</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>“The man of work—the man who toils to live,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Must still be up and doing; ’tis his privilege</div>
+      <div class='line'>That he has little time to wring his hands,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And hang his head because his fate is cruel.</div>
+      <div class='line'>John was a man of action, so, to London</div>
+      <div class='line'>Came he, and, ere a twelvemonth had gone round,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Had taken service as a city fireman.</div>
+      <div class='line'>It was an arduous life; a different life</div>
+      <div class='line'>To that of gardening, of rearing pinks,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Budding the dainty rose, and giving heed</div>
+      <div class='line'>To the unclosing of the tulip’s leaf.</div>
+      <div class='line'>But he was one of those who fear not hardship;</div>
+      <div class='line'>And when he saw his little fortunes wrecked</div>
+      <div class='line'>By the smooth villain whom he had befriended,</div>
+      <div class='line'>He left his native place with wife and children,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Mostly because it galled his soul to meet</div>
+      <div class='line'>The man who had so much abused his goodness,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And, in the wide and busy world of London,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Where, as ’tis said, is room for every man,</div>
+      <div class='line'>He came to try his luck. He was strong-limbed,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Active and agile as a mountain goat,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Fearless of danger, hardy, brave, and full</div>
+      <div class='line'>Of pity as is every noble nature.</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>“He was the boldest of the London firemen.</div>
+      <div class='line'>Clothed in his iron mail like an old warrior,</div>
+      <div class='line'>He rushed on danger, his true heart his shield;</div>
+      <div class='line'>Fear he had none whene’er his duty called.</div>
+      <div class='line'>Oft clomb he to the roofs of burning houses;</div>
+      <div class='line'>Sprang here and there, and bore off human creatures,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Frantic with terror, or with terror dumb,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Saving their lives at peril of his own.</div>
+      <div class='line'>Such men as these are heroes!</div>
+      <div class='line in34'>“One dark night,</div>
+      <div class='line'>A stormy winter’s night, a fire broke out</div>
+      <div class='line'>Somewhere by Rotherhithe—a dreadful fire—</div>
+      <div class='line'>In midst of narrow streets where the tall houses</div>
+      <div class='line'>Were habited by poor and squalid wretches,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Together packed like sheep within their pens,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And who, unlike the rich, had nought to offer</div>
+      <div class='line'>For their lives’ rescue. Here the fire broke out,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And raged with fury; here the fireman, John,</div>
+      <div class='line'>‘Mid falling roofs, on dizzy walls aloft,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Through raging flames, and black, confounding smoke,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And noise and tumult as of hell broke loose,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Rushed on, and ever saved some sinking wretch.</div>
+      <div class='line'>Many had thus been saved by his one arm,</div>
+      <div class='line'>When some one said, that in a certain chamber,</div>
+      <div class='line'>High up amid the burning roofs, still lay</div>
+      <div class='line'>A sick man and his child, who, yesternight,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Had hither come as strangers. They were left,</div>
+      <div class='line'>By all forgotten, and must perish there.</div>
+      <div class='line'>Whilst yet they spoke, upon a roof’s high ridge,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Amid the eddying smoke and growing flame,</div>
+      <div class='line'>The miserable man was seen to stand,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Stretching his arms for aid in frantic terror.</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>“Without a moment’s pause, amid the fire,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Six stories high, sprang John, who caught the word</div>
+      <div class='line'>That still a human being had been left.</div>
+      <div class='line'>Quick as a thought o’er red-hot floors he leapt,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Through what seemed gulfs of fire, on to the roof</div>
+      <div class='line'>Where stood the frantic man. The crowds below</div>
+      <div class='line'>Looked on and scarcely breathed. They saw him reach</div>
+      <div class='line'>The yet unperished roof-tree—saw him pause—</div>
+      <div class='line'>Saw the two men start back, as from each other.</div>
+      <div class='line'>They raised a cry to urge him on. They knew not</div>
+      <div class='line'>That here he met his former enemy—</div>
+      <div class='line'>The man who had returned him evil for good!</div>
+      <div class='line'>And who had lost his place for breach of trust</div>
+      <div class='line'>Some twelvemonths past, and now had come to want.</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>“The flames approached the roof. A cry burst forth</div>
+      <div class='line'>Again from the great crowd, and women fainted.</div>
+      <div class='line'>And what did John, think you—this city fireman?</div>
+      <div class='line'><span class='pageno' id='Page_494'>494</span>—He looked upon the abject wretch before him,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Who fell into a swoon at sight of him,</div>
+      <div class='line'>So sensitive is even an evil conscience,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And, speaking not a word, lifted him up</div>
+      <div class='line'>And bore him safely down into the street—</div>
+      <div class='line'>Then shook him from him like a noisome thing!</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>“Anon the man revived, and with quick terror</div>
+      <div class='line'>Asked for his child—his little four years’ son—</div>
+      <div class='line'>But he had been forgotten—still was left</div>
+      <div class='line'>Within the house to perish. Who would save him!</div>
+      <div class='line'>Grovelling before his feet the father lay,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Of all forgetful but of his dear child,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And prayed the injured man who had saved his life</div>
+      <div class='line'>To save the boy! ‘Why spake ye not of him?</div>
+      <div class='line'>He was more worthy saving of the two!’</div>
+      <div class='line'>Said John, abrupt and brief—and straight was gone.</div>
+      <div class='line'>Once more he scaled the roof. The crowd was hushed</div>
+      <div class='line'>Into deep silence: it had but one heart,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Had but one breath, intense anxiety</div>
+      <div class='line'>For that brave man who put again his life</div>
+      <div class='line'>In such dire jeopardy. None spoke,</div>
+      <div class='line'>But many a prayer was breathed. Along the roof</div>
+      <div class='line'>Anon they saw him hurrying with the child.</div>
+      <div class='line'>The red flames met him, hemmed him round about!</div>
+      <div class='line'>Escape was not! The women sobbed and moaned</div>
+      <div class='line'>Down in the crowd below; men gazed and trembled,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And wild suggestions ran throughout the mass</div>
+      <div class='line'>Of how he might be saved. But all were vain,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Help was there none! Amid the roaring flames</div>
+      <div class='line'>His voice was heard; he spake, they knew not what;</div>
+      <div class='line'>They hurried to and fro; the engines drenched</div>
+      <div class='line'>The burning pile. He made another sign!</div>
+      <div class='line'>Oh, God! could they but know what was his wish!</div>
+      <div class='line'>—They knew it not! The fierce flame mastered all—</div>
+      <div class='line'>The roof fell in—the child—the man was lost!”</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>The grandsire paused a moment, then went on;</div>
+      <div class='line'>“Yes, in our common life of every day</div>
+      <div class='line'>There are true heroes, truer, many a one,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Than they whose deeds are blazoned forth on brass!</div>
+      <div class='line'>—Now leave me to myself; give me my pipe—</div>
+      <div class='line'>You’ve had your will; I’ve told you of a hero,</div>
+      <div class='line'>One of God’s making—and he was, your own father!”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c003'>THE LIFE AND LABOURS OF LIEUTENANT WAGHORN.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c004'>The great benefactors of our species may
+be divided into two grand classes—the men
+of thought, and the men of action; the men
+whose genius was chiefly in the realm of
+mind, and those whose power lies in tangible
+things. Let no one set up the idle and invidious
+comparison as to which of the two is
+the nobler, since both are equally needful to
+the world’s progress; all great thoughts and
+theories, dreams and visions (let us never
+fear the truth, but honor it even in using
+terms of vulgar and shortsighted opprobrium)
+of men of genius and knowledge, being the
+germ and origin of great actions,—and all great
+actions being the practical working out of the
+former, without which no good to mankind
+at large can be accomplished. To set thought
+and action, therefore, in opposition to each
+other, is like setting the arms and legs of
+Hercules to quarrel with his head while performing
+his labours. Nor can the distinction,
+thus broadly stated, be drawn at all
+times with any definite precision, since the
+man who conceives and developes a new
+principle, is sometimes able to carry it out
+himself. This combination of powers in the
+same individual is very rare, and is obviously
+one reason why, in most cases, the originator
+of a new thing is neglected as a visionary, and
+a madman. But the energy of thought to
+conceive and design displayed by Lieutenant
+Waghorn, was more than equalled by the
+energy of character and action required to
+carry out his stupendous plans. Sometimes
+with the best assistance—sometimes with none—sometimes
+in defiance of contest, opprobrium,
+and opposition—the vigour of mind
+and body of this man caused him to undertake
+and to succeed in projects which are
+among the most prominent of those which especially
+characterise the genius of the present
+age.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>We have intimated that Mr. Waghorn was
+both a man of thought and action, but this
+must be understood with certain marked
+limitations. Mr. Waghorn’s mind was of that
+peculiar construction, which appears never
+to think earnestly except with a view to
+action. Even that quality, which in other
+men is of the most ideal kind, and commonly
+exerts itself in matters of little or no substantiality
+of fact and purpose, with him partook
+of the physicality of his strong nature
+as much as the admixture was possible,—so
+that he may be said to have had a practical
+imagination. His objects and designs were
+welded into all the materials of his understanding
+and knowledge; his ambitions and
+hopes were fused with the generation of the
+mighty steam-forces that were to drive his
+ships across the ocean and inland seas; the
+elasticity of his spirit was identified with the
+flying speed of Arab horses, and dromedaries
+carrying the “mail” across the desert; and
+when he projected a wonderful shortening of
+time and space, he at the same moment beheld
+the broad massive arm of England stretched
+across to govern and make use of her enormous
+Indian territories, comprising a hundred million
+of souls. He never thought of himself;
+he was too much engaged with the vastness of
+his designs for his country. We shall see how
+that country rewarded his efforts.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Thomas Waghorn was born at Chatham,
+in 1800. At twelve years of age he became
+a midshipman in Her Majesty’s Navy; and
+before he had reached seventeen, passed in
+“navigation” for Lieutenant, being the
+youngest midshipman that had ever done so—the
+examination requiring a great amount
+of both theoretical and practical knowledge,
+and being always conducted with severity.
+This made him eligible to the rank of lieutenant,
+but did not include it. At the close
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_495'>495</span>of the year 1817, he was paid off, and went
+as third mate of a Free-trader to Calcutta.
+He returned home, and, in 1819, obtained an
+appointment in the Bengal Marine (Pilot-Service)
+of India, where he served till 1824. At
+the request of the Bengal Government, he now
+volunteered for the Arracan War, and received
+the command of the Honourable East India
+Company’s cutter, Matchless, together with a
+division of gun-boats, and repaired to the scene
+of action in Arracan, with the south-eastern
+division of that army and flotilla. He was five
+times in action, saw much rough work by land
+and by sea, and escaped with only one wound in
+the right thigh. He remained two years and
+a half in this service, and after having received
+the thanks of all the authorities in
+that province, he returned to Calcutta in
+1827, with a constitution already undermined
+from the baneful fever of Arracan, where so
+many thousands had died.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Weakened as he had been, Mr. Waghorn
+nevertheless rallied to the great project
+he had secretly at heart, namely, “A
+steam communication between our Eastern
+possessions and their mother-country, England.”
+Even before his departure from Calcutta
+on furlough, in 1827, ill in health, and
+only imperfectly recovered from the Arracan
+fever, still, between its attacks, his energies
+returned. He communicated his plan to the
+officials, namely, the Marine Board at Calcutta,
+who forthwith advanced it to the
+notice of the then Chief Secretary to the
+Bengal Government, the present Mr. Charles
+Lushington, M.P. for Westminster; through
+whom he obtained letters of credence from
+Lord Combermere, then acting as Vice-President
+in Council (Earl Amherst, Governor-General,
+being on a tour in Upper India),
+to the Honourable Court of Directors of
+the East India Company in London, recommending
+him, in consequence of his meritorious
+conduct in the Arracan War, “as
+a fit and proper person to open Steam
+Navigation with India, <i><span lang="fr">viâ</span></i> the Cape of
+Good Hope.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>On his homeward voyage, Mr. Waghorn
+advocated this great object publicly by
+every means in his power (the numerous
+attestations of which lie open before us) at
+Madras, the Mauritius, the Cape, and St.
+Helena. Directly he arrived in England, he
+set about the same thing, and advocated the
+project at all points, particularly in London,
+Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham.
+But the Post Office, at that time, was opposed
+to ocean steam-navigation; and so, unfortunately,
+were the East India Directors,—with
+the single exception of Mr. Loch. Two whole
+years were thus passed in fruitless efforts to
+make great men open their eyes. At length,
+in October, 1829, Mr. Waghorn was summoned
+by Lord Ellenborough, the then Chairman of
+the Court of Directors, to go to India, through
+Egypt, with despatches for Sir John Malcolm,
+Governor of Bombay, &#38;c., and more especially,
+to report upon the practicability of the Red
+Sea Navigation for the Overland Route.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>On the 28th of October, having had only
+four days’ previous notice from the India
+House, Waghorn started on the top of the
+Eagle stage-coach from the Spread Eagle,
+Gracechurch Street. All his luggage weighed
+about twenty pounds. The East India Company’s
+steam-vessel Enterprise was expected
+to be at Suez, in the Red Sea, from India, on
+or about the 8th of December. It was much
+desired that despatches from England should
+reach her at this place, which Mr. Waghorn
+undertook they should do. He could not speak
+French nor Italian, both of which would have
+been very advantageous; but he had some
+knowledge of Hindostanee, and a little Arabic.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>On this “trip,” as Waghorn calls it, so extraordinarily
+rapid was the first part of his
+journey, <i><span lang="la">viz.</span></i> to Trieste (accomplished in nine
+days and a half, through five kingdoms) that
+an enquiry was instituted by the Foreign
+Office respecting it; for at this time our
+Post Office Letters occupied fourteen days in
+reaching that place. Yet Waghorn had been
+obliged to travel upwards of one hundred and
+thirty miles out of his direct way, in consequence
+of broken bridges, falling avalanches,
+and the disabling of a steamer.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Instantly enquiring for the quickest means
+of getting on to Alexandria, he was informed
+that an Austrian brig had sailed only the
+evening before, and having had calms and
+light airs all night, she was still in sight
+from the tops of the hills. Away he dashed
+in a fresh posting carriage, because if he
+could reach Pesano, through Capo D’Istria,
+twenty miles down the eastern side of the
+Gulf of Venice, before the Austrian vessel
+had passed, he might embark from this port
+as passenger for Alexandria. On reaching
+Pesano, he could still distinguish the vessel,
+and he accordingly strove to increase the
+rapidity of his chase to the utmost. He
+got within three miles of the vessel. At
+this juncture a strong northerly wind sprang
+up, and carrying her forward on her course,
+she was presently lost to sight. Exhausted
+in body, and “racked,” as he says, by disappointment
+after the previous excitement,
+he returned to Trieste.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Ascertaining that the next opportunity of
+getting to Alexandria would be by a Spanish
+ship, which was now taking in her cargo in
+the quarantine ground, he instantly hastened
+there. The captain informed him that he
+could not possibly sail in less than three days,
+and required one hundred dollars for the
+passage. Waghorn directly offered him one
+hundred and fifty dollars if he would sail in
+eight-and-forty hours. Whereupon the captain
+found that it <i>was</i> just possible to do so;
+and he kept his word.</p>
+
+<p class='c013'>“After a tedious passage of sixteen days,” says
+Waghorn, to whom every hour that did not fly
+was no doubt tedious, “I arrived at Alexandria,
+but hearing that Mr. Barker, who held the combined
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_496'>496</span>offices of Consul General in Egypt, and
+agent to the Honourable East India Company, was
+at his country-house at Rosetta, I hired donkeys,
+and was on my way for it after five hours’ stay at
+Alexandria.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>One ludicrous characteristic of the Alexandrian
+donkeys is worth recording. Never in
+future can we regard the epithet of “an ass,”
+as being properly synonymous with stupidity.
+The creatures ambled and trotted along very
+well during the first day; but on the subsequent
+morning, when they clearly perceived
+that a long journey was before them, they fell
+down intentionally four or five times, with
+all the signs of fatigue and weakness. The
+drivers informed him that it was a common
+practice of the donkeys.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Embarking on the Nile, our traveller made
+it his business to navigate the boat himself,
+in order to take soundings, and to obtain as
+much knowledge as would promote both the
+immediate and future objects of his journey.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Mr. Waghorn rested at Rosetta, to recover
+from his fatigue, and then set out for Cairo
+on a <i>cangé</i>, a sort of boat of fifteen tons’
+burthen, with two large latteen-sails. The
+<i>rais</i>, or captain, agreed to land him at
+Cairo in three days and four nights, or
+receive nothing. This he failed to do, in
+consequence of the boat grounding on the
+shoal of Shallakan. Waghorn’s notions of a
+reason for fatigue, may be curiously gathered
+from a remark he makes incidentally on this
+occasion. “The crew,” says he, “were <i>almost</i>
+fatigued: we have been continually tacking
+for <i>five</i> days and nights.” Being out of all
+patience, he left the boat, and again mounting
+donkeys, proceeded with his servant to Cairo.
+He left his luggage behind him, merely taking
+his despatches.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Having obtained camels, and a requisite
+passport from the Pasha, Mohammed Ali, to
+guarantee his safe passage across the Desert
+of Suez; Mr. Waghorn left Cairo on the 5th
+of December for Suez, and at sunset had
+pitched his tent on the Desert at six miles
+distance.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>At dawn of day, he was again on his
+journey, and managed to travel thirty-four
+miles beneath the burning sun before he
+halted. The next day he journeyed thirty
+miles, and in the evening pitched his tent only
+four miles short of Suez. The next day,
+he reached the appointed place, and there
+rested, the Enterprise not having yet arrived.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>While waiting with the greatest impatience
+the arrival of this steamer, Mr. Waghorn
+appears to have endeavoured to calm
+himself by jotting down a few observations
+on the Desert he had just crossed. These
+observations, slight and few as they are, must
+be “made much of,” as they are, of all things,
+the rarest with him. He always saw the <i>end</i>
+before him, and nearly all his observations
+were confined to the means of attaining it.</p>
+
+<p class='c013'>“The Desert of Suez, commencing from Cairo,
+ a gentle ascent, about thirty-five miles on the
+way; then, the same gradual descent till you
+arrive at the plains of Suez. The soil of the first
+five miles from Cairo is fine sand; then, coarse
+sand, inclinable to gravel. Within twelve miles of
+Suez” (notice—he is tired already of description,
+and brings you within twelve miles of the place)
+“you meet many sand-hills between, till you
+arrive at the plains before mentioned, which form
+a perfect level for miles in extent, leading you to
+the gates of Suez.</p>
+
+<p class='c013'>“The antelopes I observed in parties of about a
+dozen each, and the camel-drivers informed me
+that they creep under the shrubs about eighteen
+inches high, to catch the drops of dew, which is
+the only means they have of relieving their thirst.
+I saw partridges in covies of from six to seven,
+but nowhere on the wing: they were running
+about the Desert, and I was informed they were
+not eaten even by the Arabs.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Considering the food they pick up in the
+Desert, perhaps this is no wonder.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Having informed us that camels are to be
+had very cheaply at Suez—say a dollar each
+camel for fifty miles’ distance—and that the
+water is very brackish, he suddenly adds,
+with characteristic brevity, “To save recapitulation
+in <i>describing</i> Cossier, it is the
+same as Suez, <i>viz.</i>, camels are to be had in
+abundance at a trifling expense, and the water
+is as bad.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>He remained at Suez two days, waiting
+with feverish anxiety the expected arrival of
+the Enterprise. She still did not appear—a
+strong N.W. wind blowing directly down the
+sea. Being quite unable to endure the suspense
+any longer, he determined to embark
+on the Red Sea in an open boat, intending to
+sail down its centre, in hopes of meeting her
+between Suez and Cossier.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>All the seamen of the locality vigorously
+remonstrated with Mr. Waghorn against
+this attempt, and he well knew that
+the nautical authorities, both of the East
+India House and the British Government,
+were of opinion that the Red Sea was not
+navigable. But he had important Government
+despatches to deliver—had pledged
+himself to deliver them on board the Enterprise,
+and considering that his course of duty,
+as well as his reputation as a traveller, were
+at stake, he persisted in his determination.
+Accordingly, he embarked in an open boat,
+and without having any personal knowledge
+of the navigation of this sea, without chart,
+without compass, or even the encouragement
+of a single precedent for such an enterprise—his
+only guide the sun by day, and the North
+star by night—he sailed down the centre of
+the Red Sea.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Of this most interesting and unprecedented
+voyage, the narrative of which everybody
+would have read with such avidity, Mr.
+Waghorn gives no detailed account. He
+disappoints you of all the circumstances.
+All intermediate things are abruptly cut off
+with these very characteristic words:—“<i>Suffice
+it</i> to say, <i>I arrived</i> at Juddah, 620 miles,
+in six and a half days, in that boat!” You
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_497'>497</span>get nothing more than the sum total. He
+kept a sailor’s log-journal; but it is only
+meant for sailors to read, though now and
+then you obtain a glimpse of the sort of work
+he went through. Thus:—“<i>Sunday</i>, 13th,
+strong N.W. wind, half a gale, but scudding
+under storm-sail. Sunset, anchored for the
+night. Jaffateen islands out of sight to the N.
+Lost two anchors during the night,” &#38;c. The
+rest is equally nautical and technical. In one
+of the many scattered papers collected since
+the death of Mr. Waghorn, we find a very
+slight passing allusion to toils, perils, and
+privations, which, however, he calmly says,
+were “inseparable from such a voyage under
+such circumstances,”—but not one touch of
+description from first to last.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>A more extraordinary instance of great practical
+experience and knowledge, resolutely and
+fully carrying out a project which must of
+necessity have appeared little short of madness
+to almost everybody else, was never recorded.
+He was perfectly successful, so far
+as the navigation was concerned, and in the
+course he adopted, notwithstanding that his
+crew of six Arabs mutinied. It appears (for
+he tells us only the bare fact) they were only
+subdued on the principle known to philosophers
+in theory, and to high-couraged men,
+accustomed to command, by experience, <i>viz.</i>,
+that the one man who is braver, stronger, and
+firmer than any individual of ten or twenty
+men, is more than a match for the ten or twenty
+put together. He touched at Cossier on the
+14th, not having fallen in with the Enterprise.
+There he was told by the Governor that the
+steamer was expected every hour. Mr. Waghorn
+was in no state of mind to wait very
+long; so, finding she did not arrive, he again
+put to sea in his open boat, resolved, if he did
+not fall in with her, to proceed the entire distance
+to Juddah—a distance of four hundred
+miles further. Of this further voyage he does
+not leave any record, even in his log, beyond
+the simple declaration that he “embarked for
+Juddah—ran the distance in three days and
+twenty-one hours and a quarter—and on the
+23rd anchored his boat close to one of the East
+India Company’s cruisers, the Benares.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>But, now comes the most trying part of his
+whole undertaking—the part which a man of
+his vigorously constituted impulses was least
+able to bear as the climax of his prolonged
+and arduous efforts, privations, anxieties, and
+fatigue. Repairing on board the Benares, to
+learn the news, the captain informed him,
+that in consequence of being found in a defective
+state on her arrival at Bombay, “the
+Enterprise was not coming at all.” This
+intelligence seems to have felled him like a
+blow, and he was immediately seized with a
+delirious fever. The captain and officers of
+the Benares felt great sympathy and interest
+in this sad result of so many extraordinary
+efforts, and detaining him on board, bestowed
+every attention on his malady.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>“Thus baffled,” writes Mr. Waghorn, “I
+was six weeks before I could proceed onward
+to Bombay by sailing vessel.” On arriving at
+Bombay with his despatches, the thanks of
+the Government in Council, &#38;c., were voted
+to him, “for having, when disappointed of a
+steamer, proceeded with these despatches in
+an open boat, down the Red Sea, &#38;c.” There
+was evidently much more said of a complimentary
+kind, but Waghorn cuts all short
+with the <i><span lang="la">et cætera</span></i>.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>He reached Bombay on the 21st of March,
+having thus accomplished his journey from
+London in four months and twenty-one days—an
+extraordinary rapidity at this date, 1830.
+Of course, the time he was detained in Cairo,
+Suez, Cossier, and Juddah (where he lay ill
+with the fever six weeks), ought to be deducted,
+because he would have saved all this
+time, fever inclusive, if he had not expected
+the Enterprise from India.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>He now turned his attention to a series of
+fresh exhortations to large public meetings
+which he convened at different places—Calcutta,
+Madras, the Isle of France, the Cape of
+Good Hope, St. Helena, &#38;c., on the subject of
+shortening the route from England to India,
+and greatly lessening the time. He described
+the various points of the new route he proposed,
+and also the new kind of steam-vessel
+which it was advisable to have built and fitted
+up, for the sole purpose of a rapid transmission
+of the mail. In an “Address to His Majesty’s
+Ministers and the Honourable East
+India Company,” which we find among his
+papers, there occurs the following passage—simple
+in expression, noble in its quiet modesty,
+but pregnant with enormous results to
+his country, all of which have already, in a
+great degree, been accomplished.</p>
+
+<p class='c013'>“Of myself I trust I may be excused when I say
+that the highest object of my ambition has ever been
+an extensive usefulness; and my line of life—my turn
+of mind—my disposition long ago impelled me to
+give all my leisure, and all my opportunities of
+observation, to the introduction of steam-vessels,
+and permanently establishing them as the means of
+communication between India and England, including
+all the colonies on the route. The vast
+importance of three months’ earlier information to
+His Majesty’s Government and to the Honourable
+Company, whether relative to a war or a peace;
+to abundant or to short crops; to the sickness or
+convalescence of a colony or district, and oftentimes
+even of an individual; the advantages to
+the merchant, by enabling him to regulate his
+supplies and orders according to circumstances
+and demands; the anxieties of the thousands of my
+countrymen in India for accounts, and further
+accounts, of their parents, children, and friends at
+home; the corresponding anxieties of those
+relatives and friends in this country; in a word,
+the speediest possible transit of letters to the tens
+of thousands who at all times in solicitude await
+them, was a service to my mind,” (of the greatest
+general importance) “and it shall not be my fault
+if I do not, and for ever, establish it.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>By his indefatigable efforts in India, having
+extensively made known his plans and methods
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_498'>498</span>for accomplishing these great objects,
+and bringing home with him the testimonial
+of thanks he had received from the Governor
+in Council of Bombay, he returned to England.
+Let his own words—homely, earnest, straightforward,
+full of sailor-like simplicity, impulsive,
+and fraught with important results—relate
+his reception.</p>
+
+<p class='c013'>“Armed with the record of the Governor’s
+thanks, I commenced an active agitation in India
+for the establishment of steam to Europe. In
+prosecution of this design, I returned to England,
+expecting, of course, to be received with open
+arms—at the India House especially. Judge of
+my surprise on being told by the successor of Mr.
+Loch (Chairman of the court), that the India
+Company required no steam to the East at all!</p>
+
+<p class='c013'>“I told him that the feeling in India was most
+ardent for it; that I had convened large public
+meetings at Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta, and, in
+fact, all over the Peninsula, which I had traversed
+by <i>dawk</i>; that the Governor-General, Lord
+William Bentinck, was enthusiastic in the same
+cause, and had done me the honour to predict
+(with what prescience need not now, in 1849,
+be stated), that if ever the object was accomplished,
+it would be by the man who had navigated the
+Red Sea in an open boat, under the circumstances
+already named.</p>
+
+<p class='c013'>“To all this the Chairman made answer that
+the Governor-General and people of India had
+nothing to do with the India House; and if I did
+not go back and join <i>their</i> pilot service, to which
+I belonged, I should receive such a communication
+from that House as would be by no means
+agreeable to me!</p>
+
+<p class='c013'>“On the instant I penned my resignation, and
+placing it in his hands, then gave utterance to the
+sentiment which actuated me from that moment
+till the moment I realised my aspiration—that
+I would establish the Overland Route, in spite of
+the India House.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>How little must the public of the present
+day be prepared to find such a condition of
+affairs, or anything in the shape of antagonism
+in such a quarter, now that the Overland
+Route has become not only a practical thing
+for the “mail” but for ordinary travellers
+and tourists, and a matter of panorama and
+pantomime, of dioramic effects and burlesque
+songs—the sublime, and the ridiculous! But
+how did it fare with our enterprising sailor,
+after penning his resignation, and handing it
+in with such a declaration and defiance?</p>
+
+<p class='c013'>“This avowal,” says Lieutenant Waghorn,
+“most impolitic on my part as regarded my individual
+interests, is perhaps the key to much of
+the otherwise inexplicable opposition I subsequently
+met with from those upon whose most
+energetic co-operation I had every apparent
+reason to rely. I proceeded to Egypt, not only
+without official recommendation, but with a sort of
+official stigma on my sanity!</p>
+
+<p class='c013'>“The Government nautical authorities reported
+that the Red Sea was not navigable; and the
+East India Company’s naval officers declared, that,
+if it <i>were</i> navigable, the North-Westers peculiar to
+those waters, and the South-West monsoons of
+the Indian Ocean, would swallow all steamers up!
+And, as if there were not enough to crush me in
+the eyes of foreigners and my own countrymen,
+documents were actually laid before Parliament,
+showing that coals had cost the East India Company
+twenty pounds per ton, at Suez, and had
+taken <i>fifteen months</i> to get there.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Notwithstanding all these apparently overwhelming
+allegations, Mr. Waghorn succeeded
+in convincing the Pasha of the entire practicability
+of his plans; and having fully gained
+the confidence of that potentate, he obtained
+permission to proceed according to his own
+judgment. By means of his intimate knowledge
+of the whole route and all its contingencies,
+Mr. Waghorn saw that coals might
+be brought readily enough to Alexandria—then
+up the Nile—then across the Desert on
+camels—for not more than five pounds per
+ton. He immediately hastened back to England,
+and was “fortunate enough” to impress
+his conviction on this point on a very
+able public servant, Mr. Melville, Secretary
+to the East India House; and through his
+instrumentality one thousand tons of coals
+were conveyed by the route, and by the
+means above-mentioned, from the pit’s mouth
+to the hold of the steamer at Suez, for four
+pounds three shillings and sixpence.</p>
+
+<p class='c013'>“From that hour to this (June, 1849), the
+same plan, at the same, and even a smaller cost,
+has been pursued in respect of all the coals of the
+East India Company,—the saving in ten years
+being <i>three quarters of a million</i> sterling, as between
+the estimated, and the actual cost of coal.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Having now most deservedly obtained the
+friendship of the Pasha, Mr. Waghorn was
+enabled to establish mails to India, and to
+keep that service in his own hands during
+five years. On one occasion he actually succeeded
+in getting letters from Bombay to
+England in <i>forty-seven days</i>; and immediately
+afterwards both the English Government and
+the Honourable East India Company, at the
+pressing solicitations of the London, East
+India, and China Associations (Mr., since Sir
+George Larpent, Chairman) started mails of
+their own—taking from Mr. Waghorn the
+conveyance of letters, without the least compensation
+for the loss, from that time to this
+(1849); these authorities having, till then, repeatedly
+declared that they had no intention
+of having mails by this route at all.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>It should not be omitted, that, during
+these efforts, Mr. Waghorn feeling that his
+position in India would be much advantaged,
+and therefore his means of utility, if he could
+receive the rank of Lieutenant in the British
+Navy, made repeated applications to this
+effect, from 1832 to 1842. But in vain. He
+thought that his great services might have
+obtained this reward for him, especially as it
+would add to his means of usefulness. But
+no. Government, like the serpent, is a wonderful
+“wise beast,” and the ways of Ministers
+are inscrutable. All spoke of his merits,
+but none rewarded them. At length, in 1842,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_499'>499</span>Lord Haddington, being Head of the Admiralty,
+did grant this scarce and astonishing
+honour! Egypt actually beheld the man,
+who had brought England within forty-seven
+days of her sands, before any steam system
+was in operation between the two countries,
+permitted to write the letters R.N. after his
+natural name!</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>In conjunction with others, partners in the
+undertaking, Lieutenant Waghorn now arranged
+for the carriage of passengers, the
+building of hotels at Alexandria, Cairo, and
+other places, and he soon familiarised the
+Desert with the novel spectacle of harnessed
+horses, vans, and all the usual adjuncts of
+English travelling, instead of the precarious
+Arab and his primeval camel. These, with
+packet-boats on the Nile, and the canal (and
+afterwards with steamers), duly provided with
+English superintendants, rendered Eastern
+travel as easy as a journey of the same length
+in the hot summer of any of the most civilised
+countries.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Lieutenant Waghorn had now every prospect
+of making this hitherto undreamed-of
+novelty as profitable to himself in remuneration
+of his many arduous labours, as it was
+serviceable and commodious to the vast
+numbers of all countries, especially his own,
+who availed themselves of it. But unfortunately,
+just when his enterprise, industry,
+capital, and his possession of Mehemet Ali’s
+friendship were beginning to produce their
+natural results, the honourable English
+Government and the honourable East India
+Company “gave the monopoly of a chartered
+contract to an opulent and powerful Company!”
+Lieutenant Waghorn had coupled
+with his passenger system the carriage of
+overland parcels, which was a source of great
+profit, and through it there was a constant
+accession to the comforts of the passengers in
+transit. But it would seem as if the Government
+and the India House regarded this man
+only as an instrument to work out advantages
+for them, in especial, and the world at large,
+but the moment he had a prospect of obtaining
+some reward for himself, it was proper to
+stop him. Had he not been allowed to write
+Lieutenant before his name, and R.N. after
+it? What more would he have?</p>
+
+<p class='c013'>“This Company,” says Waghorn, “already extensive
+carriers by water, gleaned from my firm
+the secret of conducting my business with an
+alleged view to supply it on a much more comprehensive
+scale, and <i>to employ us in so doing</i>;
+but when nothing more remained to be learned
+from us, we were forthwith superseded, though
+with a useless and utterly unproductive expenditure,
+on the part of our successors, of six times the
+money we should have required to accomplish
+the same end. Overwhelmed by the competition
+of this giant association, I was entirely deprived
+of all advantages of this creation of my own
+energy, and left with it a ruin on my hands,
+though to have secured me at least the Egyptian
+transit would not only have been but the merest
+justice to an individual, but would have been a
+material gain to the British, public, politically and
+otherwise. In my hand the English traffic was
+English, and I venture to say that English it
+would have continued to this day, had I not been
+interfered with. But my successors gave it up to
+the Pasha.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>The absence of all circumstantial descriptions
+and all graphic details in the papers,
+both printed and in manuscript, we have previously
+noticed. We had at first made sure
+of being able to present our readers with a
+picturesque and exciting narrative of the Life
+and Adventures of Lieutenant Waghorn—for
+adventures, in abundance, both on the sea and
+the Desert, he must assuredly have had; but
+he does not give us a single peg to hang an
+action or event upon, not a single suggestion
+for a romantic scene. Once we thought we
+had at last discovered among his papers a
+treasure of this kind. It was a manuscript
+bound in a strong cover, and having a patent
+lock. Inside was printed, in large letters,
+“Private: Daily Remembrancer: Mr. Waghorn.”
+It contains absolutely nothing of the
+kind that was evidently at first intended. It
+is crammed full of newspaper cuttings; and the
+only memoranda and remembrances are two
+or three melancholy affairs of bills and mortgages
+made to pay debts incurred in the
+public service. So much for his daily journal
+of events while travelling. He was manifestly
+so completely a man of action, that he could not
+afford a minute to note it down. Had it not
+been for the vexatious oppositions by which
+he was thwarted, and the painful memorials
+and petitions he was subsequently compelled,
+as we shall find, to present in various quarters,
+we verily believe he would have given us no
+written records at all of a single thing he
+did, and all that would have been left, in the
+course of a few years after his death, would
+have been the “Overland Route,” and the
+name of “Waghorn.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>We must now take a cursory view of his
+labours. To do this in any regular order is
+hardly possible, partly from the space they
+would occupy, but yet more from the desultory
+and unmanageable condition of the papers
+and documents before us.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>During many years he sailed and travelled
+hundreds of thousands of miles between England
+and India, more particularly from the
+year 1827 to 1835, inclusive; passing up and
+down the Red Sea with mails, before the
+East India Company had any steam system
+on that sea. On one very special occasion, on
+this side the Isthmus, in October 1839, when
+the news arrived at Alexandria from Bombay,
+of Sir John (late Lord) Keane’s success at
+Ghuznee, he managed to obtain the use of the
+Pasha of Egypt’s own steamer, the Generoso,
+the very next day after Her Majesty’s
+steamer left Alexandria; and he personally
+commanded this vessel, and conveyed the
+mail to Malta, which was immediately sent
+on by the Admiral there, to England. Of
+such acts of special usefulness on occasions of
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_500'>500</span>great emergency, numerous instances might
+be related of him. His services in Egypt are
+well known to all who dwell there, or have
+travelled in that country. For the information
+of such as may not have any personal
+knowledge of these things, we may mention
+a few of the most prominent. Lieutenant
+Waghorn and his partners, without any aid
+whatever, with the single exception of the
+Bombay Steam Committee, built the eight
+halting places on the Desert, between Cairo
+and Suez; also the three hotels established
+above them, in which every comfort and even
+some luxuries were provided and stored for
+the passing traveller—among which should
+be mentioned iron tanks with good water,
+ranged in cellars beneath;—and all this in a
+region which was previously a waste of arid
+sands and scorching gravel, beset with wandering
+robbers and their camels. These
+wandering robbers he converted into faithful
+guides, as they are now found to be by every
+traveller; and even ladies with their infants are
+enabled to cross and recross the Desert with as
+much security as if they were in Europe.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>He neglected no means of making us acquainted
+with our position and line of policy
+in these countries. He wrote and published
+pamphlets in England to show the justice and
+sound policy of our having friendly relations
+with Egypt, in opposition to the undue position
+of Turkey (1837, 1838); also, to make his
+countrymen conversant with the character
+of Mehemet Ali, and with the countries of
+Egypt, Arabia, and Syria (1840); another on
+the acceleration of mails between England and
+the East (1843); and a letter to Earl Grey
+on emigration to Australia (1848). At this
+time, in conjunction with Mr. Wheatley, he
+had established an agency for the Overland
+Route to India, China, &#38;c., and had offices in
+Cornhill, which are still in active operation.
+The enormous subsequent increase of letters
+to India by the mail, may be inferred from
+this fact—that in his first arrangement,
+Lieutenant Waghorn had all letters for India
+sent to Messrs. Smith and Elder of Cornhill,
+to be stamped, and then forwarded to him in
+Alexandria: the earliest despatches amounted
+to one hundred and eighty-four letters; this
+number is now more than doubled by the
+correspondence of Smith and Elder alone, on
+their own business. They were the first booksellers
+who rightly appreciated Mr. Waghorn’s
+efforts; and they cordially co-operated with him.</p>
+
+<p class='c013'>“When he left Egypt, in 1841, he had established
+English carriages, vans, and horses, for the
+passengers’ conveyance across the Desert (instead
+of camels); indeed, he placed small steamers (from
+England) on the Nile and the canal of Alexandria.
+Every fraction of his money was spent by him in
+getting more and more facilities; and, had the
+saving of money been one of the characteristics of
+his nature, the Overland Route would not be as useful
+as it now is—and this is acknowledged by all.
+Mr. Waghorn claimed for himself, and most justly,
+the merit of this work: he claimed it without
+fear of denial; and stated upon his honour, that
+no money or means were ever received by him
+from either Her Majesty’s Government or the
+East India Company to aid it. It grew into life
+altogether from his having, by his own energy
+and private resources, worked the ‘Overland Mails’
+to and from India for two years, (from 1831 to
+1834) in his own individual person. ‘Will it
+be believed,’ says he, ‘that up to that time Mr.
+Waghorn was thought and called by many, a
+Visionary, and by some a Madman?’”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>It may very easily be believed that this
+was thought and said, as it is a common
+practice with the world when anything extraordinary
+is performed for the first time; and
+though it may be hard enough for the individual
+to bear, we may simply set it down as the
+first step to the admission of his success. But
+it is very clear the Pasha was wise enough to
+recognise the value of the man who had done
+so much, and not only accorded him his friendship
+and assistance on all occasions, but sent
+him on one occasion as his confidential messenger
+to Khosru Pasha, Grand Vizier to
+the Sultan at Constantinople, in 1839, as well
+as to Lord Ponsonby, who was there as Ambassador
+from England at this time.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Nor did his merit pass unrecognised in his
+own country; first by the public generally,
+though, perhaps, first of all by the “Times”
+newspaper, the proprietors of which were subsequently
+munificent in their pecuniary assistance
+of his efforts in the Trieste experiments,
+as indeed were the morning papers generally.
+In six successive months he accomplished the
+gain of thirteen days <i><span lang="fr">viâ</span></i> Trieste over the
+Marseilles route. Lords Palmerston and
+Aberdeen, as foreign ministers of England;
+Lords Ellenborough, Glenelg, and Ripon, and
+Sir John Hobhouse, as presidents of the India
+Board, were also fully aware of his labours
+in bringing about the “Overland Route”
+through Egypt, and thus giving stability to
+English interests in our Eastern empire.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>And now comes the melancholy end of all
+these so arduous and important labours.
+Embarrassed in his own private circumstances
+from the expenditure of all his own funds, and
+large debts contracted besides, solely in effecting
+these public objects, he was compelled, after
+vainly endeavouring to extricate himself by
+establishing in London an office of agency for
+the Overland Route, to apply to the India
+House and the Government for assistance.
+His constitution was by this time broken up
+by the sort of toil he had gone through in the
+last twenty years, and he merely asked to have
+his public debts paid, and enough allowed him
+as a pension to enable him to close his few remaining
+days in rest. He was still in the prime
+of life; but prematurely old from his hard work.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>In consequence of various memorials and
+petitions the India House awarded Lieutenant
+Waghorn a pension of 200<i>l.</i> per annum; and
+the Government did the same. But they
+would not pay the debts he had contracted in
+their service. If he had made a bad bargain,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_501'>501</span>he must abide by it, and suffer for it. Both
+pensions, therefore, were compromised to his
+creditors, and he remained without any adequate
+means of support. The following extract,
+with which we must conclude, is from
+his last memorial:—</p>
+
+<p class='c013'>“The immediate origin and cause of my embarrassments
+was a forfeited promise on the part of
+the Treasury and the India House, whereby only
+four instead of six thousand pounds, relied on by
+me, were paid towards the Trieste Route experiments
+in the winter of 1846–7, when, single-handed,
+and despite unparalleled and wholly unforeseen
+difficulties, I eclipsed, on five trials out
+of six, the long organised arrangements of the
+French authorities, specially stimulated to all
+possible exertion, and supplied with unlimited
+means by M. Guizot. On the first of these six
+occasions, there arose the breaking down, on the
+Indian Ocean, of the steamer provided for me,
+thereby trebling the computed expenses through
+the delay; and when, startled by this excessive
+outlay, I hesitated to entail more, the Treasury
+and the India House told me to proceed, to do the
+service well, and make out my bill afterwards. I
+did proceed. I did the service not only well, not
+only to the satisfaction of my employers, but in a
+manner that elicited the admiration of Europe,
+as all the Continental and British journals of that
+period, besides heaps of private testimonials, demonstrated.
+My rivals, to whom the impediments
+in my path were best known, were loudest in their
+acknowledgments; and the only drawback to my
+just pride was the incredulity manifested in some
+quarters, that I could have actually accomplished
+what (it is notorious) I did at any time, much less
+among the all but impassable roads of the Alps,
+in the depth of a winter of far more than ordinary
+Alpine severity. I presented my bill. <i>It was
+dishonoured.</i> I had made myself an invalid, had
+sown the seeds of a broken constitution, in the
+performance of that duty. The disappointment
+occasioned by the non-payment of the two thousand
+pounds, has preyed incessantly upon me
+since; and now, a wreck alike almost in mind and
+body, I am sustained alone by the hope, that the
+annals of the Insolvent Court will not have inscribed
+upon them the Pioneer of the Overland
+Route, because of obligations he incurred for the
+public, by direction of the public authorities.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>The date of this memorial is June 8th, 1849.
+High testimonials are appended to it from
+Lords Palmerston, Aberdeen, Ellenborough,
+Harrowby, Combermere, Ripon, Sir John
+Hobhouse, Sir Robert Gordon, and Mr.
+Joseph Hume. But it did not produce
+any effect; the debts and the harassing
+remained; and the pioneer of the Overland
+Route died very shortly afterwards;—we cannot
+say of a broken heart, because his constitution
+had been previously shattered by
+his labours. Yet it looks sadly like this. He
+might have lived some years longer. He was
+only forty-seven. The pension awarded him by
+the India House he had only possessed eighteen
+months; and the pension from Government
+had been yet more tardily bestowed, so that
+he only lived to receive the first quarter.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>At his death both pensions died with him,
+his widow being left to starve. The India
+House, however, have lately granted her a
+pension of fifty pounds; and the Government,
+naïvely stating, as if in excuse for the extravagance,
+that it was in consequence of the
+“eminent services” performed by her late
+husband, awarded her the sum of twenty-five
+pounds per annum. This twenty-five pounds
+having been the subject of many comments
+from the press, both of loud indignation and
+cutting ridicule, the Government made a second
+grant, with the statement that “in consequence
+of the <i>extreme</i> destitution of Mrs.
+Waghorn,” a further sum was awarded of
+fifteen pounds more! This is the fact, and
+such are the terms of the grant. Why, it
+reads like an act of clemency towards some
+criminal or other offender;—“You have been
+very wicked, you know; but as you are in <i>extreme
+destitution</i>, here are a few pounds more.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>While these above-mentioned petitions,
+memorials, and struggles for life and honour
+were going on, great numbers of our wealthy
+countrymen were rushing with bags of money
+to pour out at the feet of Mr. Hudson, M.P., in
+reward for his having made the largest fortune
+in the shortest time ever known;—and soon
+after the Government munificence had been bestowed
+on the destitute widow of Lieutenant
+Waghorn, the Marquis of Lansdowne and the
+Marquis of Londonderry, in their places in
+the House of Lords, eulogised the splendid
+“military ability” of F. M. the late Duke of
+Cambridge, speaking in high terms of the
+great deeds he would have achieved, “if he
+had only had an opportunity,” and voting
+a pension of twelve thousand pounds a year
+to his destitute son, and three thousand pounds
+a year to his destitute daughter.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>We have now beheld the labours, and the
+reward, of the pioneer of the Overland Route;
+who, for the establishment of this route and
+for manifold services subsequently rendered,
+received the “thanks” of three quarters of
+the globe, that is to say, of Europe, Asia, and
+Africa, “besides numberless letters of ‘thanks’
+from mercantile communities at every point
+where Eastern trade is concerned!” His public
+debts are not paid to this day.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c003'>CHIPS.</h2>
+</div>
+<h3 class='c007'>THE KNOCKING UP BUSINESS.</h3>
+
+<p class='c010'>New wants are being continually invented,
+and new trades are, consequently, daily
+springing up. A correspondent brings to
+light a novel branch of the manufacturing
+industry of this country, which was revealed
+to him in Manchester. Lately, he observes,
+I was passing through a bye-street in Manchester,
+when my attention was attracted
+by a card placed conspicuously in the window
+of a decent-looking house, on which was inscribed,
+in good text,</p>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c0'>
+  <div class='nf-center'>
+    <div>“<span class='fss'>KNOCKING UP DONE HERE AT 2D. A WEEK.</span>”</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>I stopped a few moments to consider what it
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_502'>502</span>could mean, and chose out of a hundred conjectures
+the most feasible, namely:—that
+it referred perhaps to the “getting up” of
+some portion of a lady’s dress, or knocking
+up some article of attire or convenience in a
+hurry. I asked persons connected with all
+sorts of handicrafts and small trades, and
+could get no satisfaction. I therefore determined
+to enquire at the “Knocking up”
+establishment itself. Thither, accordingly, I
+bent my steps. On asking for the master,
+a pale-faced asthmatic man came forward.
+I politely told him the object of my visit,
+adding, that from so small a return as 2d.
+a week, he ought to get at least half profit.
+“Why, to tell you the truth, Sir,” rejoined
+the honest fellow, “as my occupation requires
+no outlay or stock in trade, ’tis <i>all</i> profit.”
+“Admirable profession!” I ejaculated, “If it
+is no secret, I should like to be initiated; for
+several friends of mine are very anxious to
+commence business on the same terms.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Not having the fear of rivalry before his
+eyes, he solved the mystery without any
+stipulations as to secrecy or premium. He
+said that he was employed by a number of
+young men and women who worked in factories,
+to call them up by a certain early hour
+in the morning; for if they happened to oversleep
+themselves and to arrive at the mill
+after work had commenced, they were liable
+to the infliction of a fine, and therefore, to
+insure being up in good time, employed him
+to “knock them up” at two-pence a week.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>On further enquiry, he told me that he
+himself earned fourteen shillings per week,
+and his son—only ten years old—awoke factory
+people enough to add four shillings more to
+his weekly income. He added, that a friend
+of his did a very extensive “knocking up”
+business, his connexion being worth thirty
+shillings per week; and one woman he knew
+had a circuit that brought her in twenty-four
+shillings weekly.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>There is an old saying, that one half the
+world does not know how the other half live.
+I question whether ninety-nine hundredths of
+your readers will have known till you permit
+me to inform them how our Manchester friends,
+in the “Knocking up” line, get a livelihood.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c003'>STATISTICS OF FACTORY SUPERVISION.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c004'>The Rev. Mr. Baker has recently issued a
+pamphlet, defending the moral tone of the
+factory system against the charges brought
+against it in the Rev. H. Worsley’s Prize
+Essay on Juvenile Depravity. We purposely
+abstain from discussing the merits of the
+controversy, believing that the truth lies
+between the two extremes advocated respectively
+by the reverend disputants. Mr. Henry,
+however, gives a table of statistics, an abstract
+of which we cannot withhold. It shows the
+number of spinning and power-loom weaving
+concerns in the principal manufacturing districts
+of Lancashire and Cheshire; also, the
+number of partners, so far as they are known
+to the public.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>It appears that in Ashton-under-Lyne,
+Dunkinfield, and Moseley, there are fifty-three
+mills in the hands of ninety-five partners;
+Blackburn, and its immediate neighbourhood,
+has fifty-seven mills and eighty partners;
+Bolton, forty-two mills and fifty-seven partners;
+Barnley, twenty-five spinning manufactories
+and forty-six proprietors; at Heywood
+there are twenty-eight mills in the hands of
+forty-six masters. Manchester, it would appear,
+is not so much the seat of manufacture
+as of merchandise. Though it abounds in
+warehouses for the sale of cotton goods, there
+are no more than seventy-eight cotton factories,
+having one hundred and thirty-nine
+masters. Oldham has the greatest number of
+mills; namely, one hundred and fifty-eight,
+with two hundred and fifty-two proprietors;
+Preston, thirty-eight mills, sixty-two partners;
+Stalybridge, twenty cotton concerns and forty-one
+proprietors; Stockport, forty-seven mills
+and seventy-six masters; while Warrington
+has no more than four mills, owned by ten
+gentlemen. The total number of cotton manufactories
+in these districts is five hundred
+and fifty, which belong to nine hundred and
+four “Cotton Lords.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Mr. Baker’s “case” is that a proper moral
+supervision is exercised over the tens of thousands
+of operatives employed in these factories;
+and that such supervision is not delegated from
+principals to subordinates. It would seem,
+from his showing, that of the nine hundred
+and four proprietors, no more than twenty-nine
+do not reside where their concerns are
+situated; and that of the entire aggregate of
+mills, there are only four in or near to
+which no proprietor resides. Lancashire and
+Cheshire cotton factories, therefore, are as regards
+absenteeism, the direct antithesis of Irish
+estates. The consequence is, that while the
+former are in a state of average, though intermittent
+prosperity, the latter have gone to ruin.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c003'>COMIC LEAVES FROM THE STATUTE BOOK.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c004'>The most manifest absurdities while remaining
+in fashion receive the greatest respect; for
+it is not till Time affords a retrospect that the
+full force of the absurdity is revealed. When
+men and women went about dressed like the
+characters in the farce of Tom Thumb, we of
+the present day wonder that they excited no
+mirth; nor can we now believe that Betterton
+drew tears as <i>Cato</i> in a full-bottomed wig. A
+beauty who a dozen years ago excited admiration
+in the balloon-like costume of that day,
+would now, if presenting herself in full-blown
+leg-of-mutton sleeves, excite a smile. The
+more intelligent natives of Mexico are now
+more disposed to grin than to shudder, as
+they once did, at their comical idols. Everybody
+has heard of the monkey-god of India.
+In our day, those who once adored and dreaded
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_503'>503</span>him, would as readily worship <i>Punch</i>, and
+receive his squeakings for oracles, as to bow
+down before the Great Monkey.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Amongst the most prominent superstitions
+in which our forefathers believed, as a commercial
+opinion and rule of legislation, was
+“Protection;” and we have not awakened too
+recently from the delusion which descended
+from them not to perceive its absurdities,
+especially on looking over their voluminous
+legacy, the Statute Book. Before, however,
+we open some of its most comical pages, let us
+premise that the question of Protection is not
+a political one. Of the precise force and meaning
+of the term, there is a large class of “constant
+readers” who have no definite idea.
+The word “Protection” calls up in their minds
+a sort of phantasmagoria composed chiefly of
+Corn-law leagues, tedious debates in Parliament,
+Custom-houses, excisemen, smugglers,
+preventive-men and mounted coast-guards.
+They know it has to do with imports, exports,
+drawbacks, the balance of trade, and with
+being searched when they step ashore from a
+Boulogne steamer. Floating over this indefinite
+construction of the term, they have a general
+opinion that Protection must be a good thing,
+for they also associate it most intimately with
+the guardianship of the law, which protects
+them from the swindler, and with the policeman,
+who protects them from the thief. That
+powerful and patriotic sentiment, “Protection
+to British Industry,” must, they think, be
+nearly the same sort of thing, except that it
+means protection from the tricks of foreigners
+instead of from those of compatriots. They
+confess that, believing the whole matter to be
+a complicated branch of politics, they have had
+neither time nor patience to “go into it.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>In supposing the question of Free Trade or
+Protection to be a political one, they are, as
+we have before hinted, in error. It has no
+more to do with politics than their own transactions
+with the grocer and the coal-merchant;
+for it treats of the best mode of
+carrying on a nation’s, instead of an individual’s
+dealings with foreign marts and
+foreign customers. They are also wrong in
+supposing that protection to life and property
+is of the same character as that to which
+British industry is subjected. The difference
+can be easily explained; and although doubtless
+the majority of our readers are quite
+aware of it, yet for the benefit of the above-described,
+who are not, we will point it out:—Connected,
+as everybody knows, with whatever
+is protected, there must be two parties—A,
+in whose <i>favour</i> it is protected; and B,
+<i>against</i> whom it is protected. Legitimate and
+wholesome protection preserves the property
+we wish to guard against our enemies; impolitic
+and unwholesome protection too securely
+preserves property to us which we are
+most anxious to get rid of—by sale or barter,—against
+our best friends, our customers.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>These elementary explanations are absolutely
+essential for the thorough enjoyment
+of the broad comedy, which here and there
+lightens up that grave publication, the
+Statutes at Large.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>When the laws had protected English
+manufacturers, and producers from foreign
+produce and skill; they, by a natural sequence
+of blundering, set about protecting
+the British manufacturing population one
+against another, and the German jest of the
+wig-makers, who petitioned their Crown
+Prince “to make it felony for any gentleman
+to wear his own hair,” is almost realised. In
+the palmy days of Protection, a British bookbinder
+could not use paste, nor a British
+dandy, hair-powder, because the British farmer
+had been so tightly protected against foreign
+corn, that the British public could not get
+enough of it to make bread to eat.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>These were perhaps the most expensive
+absurdities into which John Bull was driven
+by his mania for protection, but they were
+by no means the most ludicrous. Among
+his other dainty devices for promoting
+the woollen manufacture, was the law which
+compelled all dead bodies to be buried in
+woollen cloth. There may not be many who
+can sympathise with the agony of Pope’s
+dying coquette:—</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b c008'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>“Odious! In woollen! ’Twould a saint provoke;</div>
+      <div class='line'>Were the last words that poor Narcissa spoke.”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c005'>But every one must be astounded at the folly
+of bribing men to invest ingenuity and industry,
+to bury that which above ground was
+the most useful and saleable, of all possible
+articles. The intention was to discourage
+the use of cotton, which has since proved
+one of the greatest sources of wealth ever
+brought into this country.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>The strangest and most practical protest of
+national common sense, against laws enacting
+protective duties, was the impossibility of compelling
+people to obey them. To those laws
+the country has been indebted for the expensive
+coast-guards, who cannot, after all,
+prevent smuggling. The disproportionate
+penalties threatened by protective laws, show
+how difficult it was to ensure obedience. In
+1765, so invincible was the desire of our
+ladies to do justice to their neat ancles,
+that a law had to be passed in the fifth
+of George the Third, (chapter forty-eight,)
+decreeing that “if any foreign manufactured
+silk stockings, &#38;c., be imported into
+any part of the British dominions, they
+shall be forfeited, and the importers, retailers,
+or vendors of the same, shall be
+subject, for every such offence, to a fine of
+two hundred pounds, with costs of suit.”
+The wise legislators did not dare to extend
+the penalties to the fair wearers, who found
+means to make it worth the while of the
+vendors to brave and evade the law.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>The complicated and contradictory legislation
+into which the <i><span lang="la">ignis fatuus</span></i> of Protection
+led men, made our nominally protective laws
+not unfrequently laws prohibitive of industry.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_504'>504</span>To protect the iron-masters of Staffordshire,
+the inhabitants of Pennsylvania (while yet a
+British colony) were forbidden, under heavy
+penalties, to avail themselves of their rich coal
+and iron mines. To protect the tobacco growers
+of Virginia (also in its colonial epoch) the
+agriculturists of Great Britain were forbidden
+to cultivate the plant—a prohibition which is
+still in force—even now, that the semblance of
+a reason or excuse for the restriction exists.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>The petty details into which these prohibitions
+of industry, under the pretext of protecting
+it, descended, can only be conceived
+by those who have studied the Statutes at
+Large. An act was passed in the fourth of
+George the First (the seventh chapter) for
+the better employing the manufacturers, and
+encouraging the consumption of raw silk.
+This act provides “that no person shall make,
+sell, or set upon any clothes or wearing garments
+whatsoever, any buttons made of serge,
+cloth, drugget, frieze, camlet, or any other
+stuff of which clothes or wearing garments
+are made, or any buttons made of wool only,
+and turned in imitations of other buttons, on
+pain of forfeiting forty shillings per dozen for
+all such buttons.” And again, in the seventh
+year of the same George, the twenty-second
+chapter of that year’s statutes declared that
+“No tailors shall set on any buttons or
+button-holes of serge, drugget, &#38;c., under
+penalty of forty shillings for every dozen
+of buttons or button-holes so made or set
+on.... No person shall use or wear
+on any clothes, garments, or apparel whatsoever,
+except velvet, any buttons or button-holes
+made of or bound with cloth, serge,
+drugget, frieze, camlet, or other stuffs whereof
+clothes or woollen garments are usually made,
+on penalty of forfeiting forty shillings per dozen
+under a similar penalty.” These acts were insisted
+on by the ancient and important fraternity
+of metal button-makers, who thought they
+had a prescriptive right to supply the world
+with brass and other buttons “with shanks.”
+Shankless fasteners, made of cloth, serge, &#38;c.,
+were therefore interdicted; and every man,
+woman, and child, down to the time when
+George the Third was king, was <i>obliged</i> to
+wear metal buttons whether they liked them
+or not, on pain of fine or imprisonment.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>The shackles and pitfalls in which men
+involved themselves in their chase after the
+illusive idea of universal protection were as
+numerous, and more fatal than those with which
+Louis the Eleventh garnished his castle at
+Plessis-le-Tours. It was impossible to move
+without stumbling into some of them. British
+ship-builders were allowed to ply their trade
+exclusively for British ship-owners; but,
+in return, they were compelled to buy the
+dear timber of Canada, instead of that of
+the Baltic. British ship-owners had exclusive
+privileges of ocean carriage, but had to pay
+tribute to the monopoly of British ship-builders
+and Canadian lumberers. British
+sailors were exclusively to be employed in
+English ships, but in return they were at the
+mercy of the press-gangs. Dubious advantages
+were bought at a price unquestionably
+dear and ruinous.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>The condition of our country while possessed
+by the fallacy of protection, can be compared
+to nothing so aptly, as to a man under
+the influence of a nightmare. One incongruity
+pursues another through the brain. There is a
+painful half-consciousness that all is delusion,
+and a fear that it may be reality—there is a
+choking sense of oppression. The victim of
+the unhealthy dream, tries to shake it off and
+awaken, but his faculties are spell-bound. By
+a great effort the country has awakened to the
+light of day, and a sense of realities.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>The way in which the rural population,
+great and small, were protected against one
+another, may be well illustrated by an extract
+from the third of James the First, chapter
+fourteen. This act was in force so lately as
+1827, for it was only repealed by the seventh
+and eighth of George the Fourth, chapter
+twenty-seven. The fifth clause of this precious
+enactment made a man who had not
+forty pounds a year a “malefactor” if he
+shot a hare; while a neighbour who possessed
+a hundred a year, and caught him in the fact,
+became in one moment his judge and executioner.
+After reciting that if any person who
+had not real property producing forty pounds
+a year, or who had not two hundred pounds’
+worth of goods and chattels, shall presume to
+shoot game, the clause goes on to say—“Then
+any person, having lands, tenements, and hereditaments,
+of the clear value of one hundred
+pounds a year, may take from the person or
+possession of such malefactor or malefactors,
+and to his own use for ever keep, such guns,
+bows, cross-bows, buckstalls, engine-traps,
+nets, ferrets, and coney dogs,” &#38;c. This is
+hardly a comic leaf from the statute book.
+Indignation gives place to mirth on perusing
+it. Some portions of the game-laws still in
+force could be enumerated, equally unreasonable
+and summary.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Most of the statutes contain a comical
+set of rules of English Grammar, which are
+calculated to make the wig of Lindley Murray
+stiffen in his grave with horror; they run
+thus:—“Words importing the singular number
+shall include the plural number, and words
+importing the plural number shall include the
+singular number. Words importing the masculine
+gender shall include females. The word
+‘person’ shall include a corporation, whether
+aggregate or sole. The word ‘lands’ shall
+include messuages, lands, tenements, and hereditaments
+of any tenure. The word ‘street’
+shall extend to and include any road, square,
+court, alley, and thoroughfare, or public
+passage, within the limits of the special act.
+The expression ‘two justices’ shall be understood
+to mean two or more justices met and
+acting together.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Thus ends our chapter of only a few of the
+mirth provocatives of the Statutes at Large.</p>
+<div class='pbb'>
+ <hr class='pb c014'>
+</div>
+<div class='tnotes x-ebookmaker'>
+
+<div class='chapter ph2'>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c0'>
+<div class='nf-center c015'>
+    <div>TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+</div>
+
+ <ul class='ul_1 c001'>
+    <li>Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
+
+    </li>
+    <li>Renumbered footnotes.
+    </li>
+  </ul>
+
+</div>
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78191 ***</div>
+  </body>
+  <!-- created with ppgen.py 3.57i (with regex) on 2026-02-06 17:39:33 GMT -->
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for eBook #78191
+(https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78191)