The Express.
London, England, 1866-01-23 00:00:00

BRITANNIA.

Tam ETraING. OLD DADDitokai.EGS AND SIR =GENT
CIRCU:s : OR, TIM GOLDEN APPLES. —IL and Madame
Stertzouhach.—Signor BevanL—Olmar.-Bhower of Golden Rain.
—Johnny Day.—And JZSIME, THE MORMON'S DAUGHTER.

HIGH WATTS. AT LONDON-BM:Mi.
D DAY llorang, eh. 23m..... Afternoon, On. 4tm„
to-noasow Mantis& 7h. 13m.....A1t0rn00n, Tn. am.

LONDON. TUESDAY. JANUARY 23.

AT Romford, on Friday last, a certain Rosaar
Wruisms was charged before the magistrates with
criminally assaulting a girl of seventeen years of
age in a railway carriage. The offence was proved,
and the prisoner was sentenced to the moderate
fine of 201. In neither the crime nor the nature
of the penalty is there, unfortunately, any peen-'
Eerily. We have of late become familiar with narra-
tives of such outrages in such places, and we are also
quite accustomed to find the indulgence of brutality ,
appraised at • pecuniary rate, instead of being
punished in the person of the offender. To have
stolen a pocket-handkerchief is, according to some
of our administrators of justice, an offence more
serious than to attempt to rob a woman of all that
makes life dear. But the singularity in the case
to which we would invite attention lay
in the manner in which the attempt warn
discovered and defeated. The girl had been I
impertinently acooeted by the man on the platform I
of the station. She repulsed him, and got into a I
second-class carriage, next the engine, by herself, '
but the man followed, and the train started. The'
proceedings had, however, been observed by the
driver of the engine, and be, expecting what might
happen, dared, at the risk of instant death, to
clamber along the buffers of the engine, holding by
the lamp irons of the carriage, till he could see
into the carriage where the two were alone. Hel
saw tho girl weeping, the man kissing her. Scared •
by the apparition, the man desisted, and the driver
returned to his poet. A second and third time,
however, he thought it right to see that no harm
should happen to the defenceless girl, and he re-
peated his perilous transit. On the last occasion
he was in time, but no more than in time, to save •
her from the worst outrage. He did save her, and
when the train stopped the man was given into
custody—to pay ultimately 201. for his miscalcula-
tion of being unseen and alone with his victim.
We observe that the magistrates greatly ap-
plauded the engine-driver's gallant conduct in
risking his life for so good a deed. And we think
the whole public will agree with them, even though
it is true that it was not his own life only that
he risked, but that of all the passengers in the'
train of which ho was the conductor. But railway
directors have known for many a year past that
they peril men's liven and women's honour every hour
during which they compel a journey to be per-
formed in carriages in which a passenger of either
sex may be left alone with the greatest villain,
and with no hope of human rescue. They know
that thus murders have been done and rapes com-
mitted. They know, too, that even where violence
has not been used by criminals, madmen have been
allowed to terrify their fellow-passengers into
almost insanity, and that designing and abandoned
women have been enabled to blast the character of
honourable men. Yet with all this happening
under their control we see no means devised for
preventing it.

It would be wrong to say that they all agree
that no means can be used to obviate such
dangers in their carriages. Some of them have
actually fitted up a glass case, within which, if
a stunned and bleeding passenger, or a solitary
woman in a ruffian's grip, will have the goodness
to reach and break it, will be found a very
ingenious mechanical arrangement for letting the
guard know that something peculiar is occurring,
and suggesting to his judgment the propriety of
stopping the train. And only a few days ago we
were informed of a meeting of railway directors to
see another ingenious arrangement, consisting of
a tube running from end to end of the train, in
which a strong current of air is to be created by a
steam blast, so as to suck along and ultimately
eject in the guard's face a ball, which the pas-
senger in agony is to insert in the mouth
of the tube in the carriage, taking care to select
from the assortment of balls of different colours
provided for the purpose one of which the
tint is emblematic of the cue, whether it be
murder, rape, robbery, or arson. We are told
that this experiment was eminently successful, and
that the directors, admiring it much, saw only one
disadvantage in the scheme. Tbey thought that
if a guard was informed by the expectoration of a
specially coloured ball that some deed of violence
was being perpetrated in the train, he might at-
tempt to move along the footboard to the aid of
the sufferer ; and they remarked that the number
of deaths from guards moving along the footboard
is very considerable on the Continent. We are
perfectly ready to agree with them in both their
statements, but we cannot admit that such facto
absolve them from their responsibility. It is their
business to provide means by which the guards
can safely psis from end to end of the train. Such
means are notoriously in daily use in America,
where the trains are all of one class, and in Swit-
zerland, where they comprise different clamea,
as with us. When railway directors tell us
that by bad systems lives are sacrificed,
they tell us what is unfortunately a house-
hold truth. But when they wish us to infer that
by no conceivable system lives can be made secure