The Press.
London, England, 1853-10-29 00:00:00

RAILWAY REFORM.

So far as the public safety is coneerned. it is
surely high time that some attempt should be
made to diminish the number of accidents
which are daily taking place throughout the
kingdom. The following returns for the lest
four years will ►:how the progressive dangers
of railway travelling in that short interval.

THE PRESS.

They appear in the last report of the Parlia•
mental", Committee published a few weeks
since :-
1.50. iiksl. 1.52.
Mileage open 6031 6,0:1 u,stoo 7,3.14
Number of passengers killed
and injured
It is obvious from these figures that the
gradual increase of railway accommodation
will not enable us to account for the rapid in-
crease of insecurity. Augmented traffic, false
economy, and other causes, have been assigned
for this. But the evil is admitted, and the
question of the day is, how to cure it? Upon
this point, one of the witnesses examined
before the Committee affords some important
information. We have heard many complaints
of late as to the harassing duties imposed
upon the engine-drivers ; and, considering
that the safety of railway travellers depends
entirely upon the competence of these men,
the subject demands the fullest attention. In
the meantime we would point out the very
unsatisfactory mode in which these officers
appear to be selected. The locomotive en-
gineer of the Great Northern, a person of great
experience in railway management, describes
it as follows :
" The driver of a locomotive is generally
" first the cleaner of an engine. A sharp.
" active cleaner is promoted to be a fireman,
" and, after firing three, four, or five years, ho is
" made a driver. That is the ordinary routine
" education of probably two-thirds of the
" drivers in the kingdom."
The same witness says :—" I think it would
" be a very groat point that the engine-drivers
" should be gradually better educated, and a
" better class of men generally. If it were
" possible by any means to do this, it would
" increase the public security in the driving
"of the engines." He adds :—" I have no
" doubt that many accidents have happened
from the negligence of the driver, mainly
" from his not feeling thoroughly the responsi-
" bilities attaching to him, and not keeping eon-
" tinually a look-out, so as to see signals."
Considering the source whence they come,
these admissions are remarkable. the wit-
ness who makes them is an eulogist of railway
management in general, and, like most offi-
cials, opposed to change. He speaks with
caution, if not reluctance, as to the defective
training of the engine-drivers, upon whose
steadiness and skill the lives and limbs of so
many of us frequently depend. We sincerely
trust, therefore, that the testimony of this in
telligent witness will not be thrown away
upon his superiors. The public have a right
to insist that every possible precaution should
be taken to ensure safe travelling ; and, in
order to remedy this glaring evil, we would
suggest that every passenger-train should be
compelled to carry, in addition to the driver,
a person whose sole duty it should be to keepa
constant look-out throughout the journey. We
learn now, upon unquestionable authority,
that the driver is frequently incompetent ;
and we know that, in addition to this, his
faculties, both bodily and mental, are often
overtasked. A case was cited the other day
by a contemporary of a man who had been on
the move some seventeen or eighteen hours
at a stretch, and who arrived at his journey's
end more asleep than awake. And yet upon
him alone, during the whole of that time, de
volved the double task of attending to his
engine and keeping a continual lookout. The
exhaustion attending this harassing duty, es•
neeiully in wet or stormy weather. is well
known ; and hence we would furnish every
engine with a pilot. to divide the responsibili-
ties of the driver, and who should be qualified
to take his place in case of need. The project
might not have the effect of increasing divi
(lends, but we are convinced that it would
materially diminish the number of accidents,
and thus remove from our railway manage-
ment a reproach which now most justly
attaches to it.

SATURDAY,

THE AMENITIES OF MODERN
WARFARE.

Tim heroes of HO3Oll, as every schoolboy
knows, swore at each-other lustily on entering
a campaign ; but the note in which OMER
PACIIA tells Prince GORTsCHAKOFF that he had
received orders from his Government to attack
the Russian invading army, unless—within a
limited time—it withdrew from the provinces
it had entered, is a model of polite military
correspondence. So far from holding out a
threat, OMER states that, as a proof of its
pacific disposition, the Sublime Porte suggests,
through his intervention, the evacuation of the
principalities—allows the Prince ample time
to consider his answer—and concludes with
the expression of his high personal esteem for
the Russian general. The answer of the
Prince, though short, was to the purpose, and
perfectly polite—viz., that, having no instruc-
tions to attack, ho should act entirely on the
defensive.
Such, then, is the wide interval between the
ancient Greek and the much-disparaged Turk
of the nineteenth century. Nor is the spirit
that dictates these modern courtesies confined
to matters of form. It may be remembered that,
in 1840, during the Syrian campaign at the
bombardment of Beyront, a boat with a flag
of truce came off to the English ships : it
bore the Indian mail which had just arrived,
and which was thus, without a moment's delay
delivered to Sir ROBERT STOPTORD. The cour-
tesy acknowledged, the firing recommenced.
It is less surprising that, in the Spanish
war between the French and the English,
little friendly dealings and kind acts should
have been common. Thus the Duke of WEI..
LINGTON never made a general attack without
first sending notice to the French outposts
" for all those fellows," the pickets and sen-
tries, "to be off." But the French and English,
besides being the two most highly-civilised
nations on earth, had, in addition, a respect
and esteem for each other founded on a re-
cognition of a common valour, proved in many
a desperate contest. It is amusing to read
in Mr. LARPEXT'S journal that when the
ships bringing hay and other stores for
the English army then in the Pyrenees
were cast away on the French coast,
and wrecked, near Bayonne, the French
sent to the Duke to say that " the English
hay was sweet and very good," to which the
Duke replied, " that he should be very happy
to buy some ;" and that then a bargain was
made and carried out between the friendly
enemies. " Chivalry," says BURKE, "by taking
" away from vice all its grossness has deprived
" it of half its evil"; and, what ancient chi-
valry did for vice, modern civilisation has
done for war—stripped it of its worst atroci
ties, and so deprived it of half its evils. We
hear no more of embargoes suddenly laid, in
apprehension of war, on ships lying securely
in ports which they had entered in the confi-
dence of peace; on the contrary, when war is
imminent, and, humanly speaking, inevitable
—indeed when, strictly speaking, it has com-
menced—the Sultan hastens to declare that
the Russian ships in the Turkish waters are
free to depart, and that the Dardanelles shall
be open to the commerce of the world ; whilst
the Emperor of RUSSIA assures the British
merchants at St. Petersburg that their pro-
perty shall be unmolested, if the property of
his subjects is similarly treated by England—
nay more, a Russian frigate in want of repairs
actually enters Portsmouth harbour, and is
there refitted.
It may seem that, while the spirit that
prompts these acts exists, war, real war, is
impossible ; that to refit the Russian ship the
Aurora one week in an English naval arsenal
and dockyard, and to lay an English ship
alongsideher a fortnight afterwards, to sink
her by the tire of a concentrated broadside in
the Baltic, is a practical paradox too startling
to occur ; yet it is not so in reality. Recog-
nising wars as dread necessities, there is no
reason why we should not enter into them,
and carry them on, in the spirit of civilisation,
instead of that of barbarism. The ferocity of
the middle ages, or of a later period, will no
more prevail in international warfare. No

OCTOBER 29, 1853.

future Froissart will have to 'venni like
the first that an English general reconnoi-
tring a town at night, and finding it too strong
to be attacked in a regular way with success,
" yet resolved to let them of the town know
that he had been there ;" and that he accom-
plished his resolution by the mildly-emphatic
process of setting fire to the suburbs and to
a monastery in which were :►OO monks who
were all burnt to death. Nor will another
Schiller have to relate a slaughter like that
at Magdeburg. when TILLY put to death men,
women, and children—all he could find—to the
number of 30,000.
Yet, because the footstep of war will in its
march no more be marked by useless at►oei-
ties, the impress of war when it does come
in the lands over which it passes may not be
the less terrible nor the less indelible. En-
tered into, not from sudden impulse, not in
gusts of passionate fury, but from an abso-
lute conviction that it is indispensable for the
future security of the world, it may be carried
on with all the rigour and the dignity of a
proceeding that has its foundation in prinei
pie, not in violence ; and it may assume the
character with the dimensions of a judicial
proceeding in which united nations after sit
ting in judgment pronounce and enforce, with-
out inflicting unnecessary pain on the cri-
minal, a severe sentence on a nation or their
rulers.