The Express.
London, England, 1847-10-18 00:00:00

sanitiiy legislation.

Norr..—lt in suspected that the Archduke Frederic, Admiral of the
Am& an Navy, who served eo gallantly with us m the cored of Syria,
wog tarried away, the other day at Vivnna, by no other malady than
the cholera.

Wa have seat that the eels w govanment
is by some perms urged le mast any outlay
in railroad works, heyoad a certain amount, can only
be efhadve in es hr as it may prevent railway pro-
prietors ilia spending money which they would
employ he that way but for such prohibition. The
assiers, tharefeee, must plainly be justified or cos-
demned on the ground of its being a bar to the vo.
Inatery comes of enterprise by certain parties in a
certain direction, for the supposed advantage of other
branches of the public interest ; no special inter.
ference being required to protect the railway com-
panies themselves from laying oat more of their own
money than they are willing and able to contribute.
Such being the nature of the plan, it will be expo-
dient, before it is adopted, to compare the certain
inconvenience that will result from any consider-
able stoppage of the supplies with the much less
certain benefit which it is proposed to obtain for the
mercantile at the ampenue of the railway body.
The amount of the mischief to be apprehended
from interference in this quarter will, of course, depend
upon the extent to which the prohibition may be for-
cibly applied,—that is to say, upon the quantity of
money that the proposed limitation would divert from
the channel into which it would otherwise have
flowed. To estimate this might be a hazardous task.
We do not know, in the first place, to what degree
the natural operations of the existing dearness of
money will compel the directors, without any com-
mand from parliament, to retard the progress of rail-
way works during the next six months. That this
process is going on, and will probably be carried tar
during the present quarter, we are glad to know ; be-
cause in the hands of the parties directly concerned
it is not likely to be carried too far. How much,
therefore, of the million a week, which the Examiner
boldly declares ""is to be expended on raibrays,"
would really come within the reach of state empiric
we cannot guess with the confidence of our con-
temporary, having learned from some observation of
real business to avoid making random estimates.
Still less is it possible to divine the maximum that
Sir CHARLES WOOD may think it proper to allow for
this expenditure, whether five millions a year or
twenty. The less or more of the mischief apt to be
produced by any violent constraint will, of course,
be determined by these two statements; and no pre-
cise amount can be set down for either at the present
moment. All that we can say before going into
figures pro fornwi is, that the tendency of the pro-
cess in question, if not the exact measure of its effects,
I will be displayed by them : the character of its action
may be shown, its degree will depend on causes we
cannot now estimate. It will probably appear that
such efforts as it will be apt to produce in any de-
gree whatever arc very seriously to be deprecated at
the present season—that the minister who shall do
anything whatever to bring them to pass, except in a
case of inevitable necessity, and with a very sure
prospect of some great compensating good, will
incur a fearful responsibility.
We may cast aside at once the Examiner's
"million a week," as one of those flourishes of closet
rhetoric that has no right to be heard in a matter of
serious business; and shall come to more sober calcu-
lations. Let us suppose that the amount of railway
expenditure on new works, if left to itself, for the
next six months, might be some ten or twelve millions.
Of the lower sum, there might be about four millions
payable for land, legal, and official expenses, and other
items that have little to do with the manual labour of
working men. The six millions that would remain
" may be taken for practical purposes, as to be expended
in one way or the other in the wages of day labour.
They will either be paid directly to the navigators,
bricklayers, and other workmen on the line, or they
will be spent in purchasing rails and other mate-
rials and implements for its uses, the cost of
which in a great measure consists of the work-
men's wages employed in making them. This
sum, equal to some 250,0001. a week, may be taken
without exaggeration as the subsistence of at least
240,000 labourers and artisans, with families, for
which the number of individuals supported thereby
must at least be doubled, their earnings representing
an amount nearly equal, we believe, to the poor rates
levied for the same period in England. Now the
question with which we have to deal is, of the wisdom
of forcibly throwing these men, or any considerable
number of these men, out of work at the beginning of
winter, a season when, as is well known, there is so
extra demand in other quarters, to give those who
may be thus discharged a chance of other employment.
Every thousand pounds per week that the railways
would raise but for the proposed veto, and may be by
it forbidden to raise, will deprive at least four or five
hundred men of the means of supporting themselves
and their families; say, or, a moderate estimate, will
take the bread out of some twelve hundred mouths
during a time of the year when poverty is the most
afflicting. These men cannot be left to starve. Who,
then, must keep them? 'They will fall upon the
parish in all directions ; and their maintenance out of
the poor rates will be so much added to the burthen
most heavily pressing on the middle classes through-
out the kingdom. Nor is this all. The wages
threatened to be cut off are now immediately spent in
buying food, clothing, and other necessaries ; the
supply of which is a valuable business to the
shopkeepers and tradesmen. The same process that
pauperises the railway labourer, and stops railway
works, will suddenly dry up all those branches of in-
ternal trade that provide the subsistence of these men
who are employed in the preparation of the materials
to be used by the contractors. A remedy that will act
in this way does not look very like • cure ; it is
surely a auestionable method of relieving the distress
we now feel to begin, by drawing it down on the
heads of others who arc now exempt from it. Those
who would insist on having this specific tried, are
bound, we think, to show in what manner the num-
bers to be thrown out of work may be supported ;
how the loss of the demand which the expenditure of
their wages now creates may be compensated so as to
avoid adding a new amount of social misery and em-
barrassment to what we are now enduring. We shall
gain little by the process if it merely serves, like the
manoeuvre with the scanty cloak in the fable, to par-
tially cover one part of the social body by stripping
another utterly naked.
We have no desire to overstate this argument, or
to look, as most of those who have dealt with the
question have done, on one side of it only. If it can
be proved that a continuance of the process that is
now supporting hundreds of thousands in honest in-
dustry, by means of railway works, will necessarily
produce effects by which other hundreds of thousands
in other employments will be thrown out of work—
that there is no choice, in short, between one of these
two grievous evils— one may well hesitate to pro-
Inounce decidedly on so fearful an alternative. But
the onus of this proof is a grave one, seeing that the
mischief on the one hand is unmistakeable, and
that to demonstrate the equivalent on the
other, it must be made equally clear, not
merely that the alleged difficulties exist—which
no one, indeed, denies; but also that there is no
way of relieving them but by producing distress in
another quarter, and that the railway workmen
labourers, and artisans, are those on whom it ought
to fall. In any country, but in a country like Eng-
land especially, the prospect of doing any good to the
whole, by forcibly taking from one part what you
pretend to give to another, is, at least, questionable.
But it will require no common boldness to proceed in
a rude policy of this kind at a time when many, and
those not the least wise and conversant with the daily
business of life in this country, strenuously assert that
the real cause of the evil does rot lie on our expen-
diture on national public works at all ; and that the pro-
per remedy fur our distress may be found by a better
way than that of wilfully increasing the number of
the sufferers. At all events, we repeat, this imminent ,
consequence of the measures proposed, which, as far as
we have seen, has scarcely been regarded at all in de.
vising the scheme of stopping railway supplies, will
have to be taken into account. It can neither be de-
nied nor evaded ; and no argument against railway
calls can be deemed valid, that shall not produce rea-
sons strong enough to recor.cile us to the certain dis-
tress which any extensive and arbitrary stoppage of
them will inflict on a numerous class of our popula-
tion.
In the presence of a matter so serious as this is, the
injury that may be done to the railway owners' pro-
perty, by roughly mowing down their funds, must oc-
cupy but a secondary place : yet, hereby an amount
of mischief may be wrought, and a degree of hard-
ship inflicted, that the hasty-advocates of inter-
ference may have little notion of. It is not
merely to be apprehended that, by suddenly stop-
ping supplies, many advanced works that might
soon become profitable will be condemned to lie
wholly useless. A general derangement of finances
must ensue from any arbitrary dealing with resources