1 files changed, 2416 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/78191-0.txt b/78191-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a72d8e7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/78191-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,2416 @@
+*** 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 ***