The Sun.
London, England, 1865-01-28 00:00:00

13 965
35 783

SPIRIT OF T:

is most natural that the Queen should
feel more than most of her subjects the sudden and
rather alarming increase in the number of railway
accidents, and that she should also feel it her duty
to call attention to them. Nobody in the realm has
so much opportunity of knowing the powers of the
rail as to speed, precision, and safety. Her Majesty
has often to perform feats of railway travelling—to
traverse the better part of the island in a day ; to
make the beginning and the end of the journey fit
in with other arrangements ; to change engines and
lines ; to be expected everywhere in a minute, and
to a minute to make her appearance. Wherever
she is, her family, her household, her Ministers, her
visitors are always coming and going, sometimes by
special, sometimes by ordinary trains. Time is
generally an object with them, nor can they always
suit their own time to the convenience of the com-
panies. The public, indeed, is very ready to believe
that a Royal train has something to do with a rail-
way block or delay ; but we have never had occa-
sion to inquire into such a belief without finding the
public mistaken. Her Majesty, then, sees what can
be done, and finds herself and her friends, as it
were, in a charmed circle of railway speed, safety,
and convenience. It is a most queenly instinct to
wish to include the whole people in this circle, to
make her own case, as far as possible, the rule and
not the exception, and to compensate for the trifling
inconvenience she may occasionally cause by raising
the standard of railway safety. She may be per-
mitted, too, a special consideration for those whom
she is daily placing in what now certainly seems to be
a position of risk. The members of the Royal family,
the Ministers, and the members of the Court must
travel very frequently, and must often use the ordi-
nary trains. If they have been fortunate hitherto ;
indeed if first-class passengers, with the power of
choosingtheir trains, have as a rule escaped accidents,
that is all the more reason for believing that every-
body may travel with equal safety. A succession
of serious accidents on a railway of which many a
long mile may be seen from Windsor Terrace has
possibly brought her Majesty's anxiety to a point
which compelled this relief to her feelings. It used
to be said that you might feel perfectly safe on a
line where there had been a serious accident the day
or the week before. In this instance the rule has
been reversed. The line seemed to have got into a
muddle, and it would be wise to wait till the com-
pany had got out of it. There really is little room
for the intrusion of chance, or even folly, into the
management of a railway. The conditions are sim-
ple, not many, and every day easier and cheaper, for
science and experience bring in daily aids. Make
the road sound and the rails strong and well laid,
make the engines of sufficient power and the trains
not too long, make the intervals sufficient and the
signals unmistakable, have servants enough to secure
them from overwork, and give sufficient law for
delays if inevitable, and the matter seems redliced
to as much certainty as is to be found in human
affairs. There are no winds and waves, tides and
currents, rocks and sands to be encountered—no
errors of the compass, no imperfection of the chart,
no waiting in vain for meridian or lunar observa-
tions. The engine is not a horse to stagger or stum-
ble, to shy or run away from inscrutable causes. It
has no vice, and not a fancy or a whim of its own.
The natural causes that prey on the rolling stock
and undermine the permanent way are very slow in
operation, and can be overtaken by care as easily as
the tortoise can be caught by the hare. In pointing
out the necessity of the hest material we are reduced
to talk in truisms. It is the human agency that is
fallible and not quite accountable. If men are
overworked, if they drink for a brief stimulus, or
because the season invites ' • if the man responsible
for the time deputes his task to a less qualified
assistant, or at a critical place and a critical time a
pointsman delegates his most critical duties to a
novice, then the best material and the best arrange-
ments may be thrown away—nay, they may even
aggravate the disaster. But how is this to be met ?
It would be idle to say that the directors can see to
every turn of a man's hand, or secure that he shall
alwayshave his wits about him. But they can arrange
that he shall not be overworked and that he shall
have the opportunity of needful rest. There are
people who are very soon unfitted for the slightest
exercise of the reasoning faculties ; who, perhaps,
could never answer a plain question with promptitude
even so much as to say " right " or " left," and who
cannot be worked an additional hour without losing
their self-possession altogether. The overworking of
the service we believe to be the chief cause of the late
accidents. The intervals ought to be ample, and,
where the numbers of trains renders it necessary to
reduce the intervals, the stationmaster ought at least
to have telegraphic information of the trains that
have passed the stations on each side of him. If a
train breaks down, and is consequently overdue at
its next station, the master of the station last passed
through ought to be enabled to give warning of the
danger ahead. Practically we suspect themost fertile
cause of disasters is the running of fast and slow
trains, passenger and goods trains, on the same lines
—lines more complicated from day to day by new
junctions, and by the combination of broad and nar-
row guage. With the heavier material and the slower
engines go the blunter intelligence and the lower
standard of duty. The slow trains appear to think
nothing of being half an hour behindhand, or shunt-
ing clumsily into a siding when by the time-table a
fast train ought to be dashing by. This, of course, is
an affair of management, for though a dung-cart is a
heavy and tedious thing its speed and time are quite
as accountable as those of a racehorse. Nobody need
complain of the pace of our fast trains, which is ex-
ceeded, we believe, by several Continental expresses.
It is the heavy traffic, as in our own London streets,
that is always stopping the way or throwing things
out of order. The public, of course, look into the evi-
dence given upon the actual disasters for the causes
of the mischief. But the Directors have a much
fuller and more satisfactory mass of facts at their
command. Upon every line in the kingdom there
are every day many irregularities, inconvenient to
the public, though short of disaster. Every day
there are escapes which the public never hear of.
Nothing could be easier than for some one of the
directors to make it his special care to inquire into
these irregularities, to visit the avoidable cases with
punishment, and to meet those unavoidable with
the requisite improvement or alteration. If trains
cannot keep their time, give them more time. If a
locomotive is not powerful enough to draw an extra
carriage or two, supply its place with another. If
a little extra trafficat a station compels a detention,
put another man there. If a driver is often in fault,
supersede him, or find him work more suited to his
capacity. A great breeder of racehorses who took
part in a recent correspondence in these columns
observed, quite by the way, that many studs and
stables had been ruined by good nature. Lubberly
boys like eating and drinking, and also prefer riding
to other forms of exercise. So they like to be grooms,
and if their fathers are in the stable they get
what they want. But the horses suffer, and the
owner is victimised. On a railway it may be good
nature, but it is also robbery and murder to give a
serious responsibility to a fellow who may mean
well, but whose ruling taste is for repose and self-
indulgence. Fat brains and heavy bodies are among
the curses of civilisation. All the paths of life are
choked with them, and there is nothing they do not
ask for, from a primacy to the command of a colony
or a fleet. But a railway staff, like every other
service, may soon suffer what medical people call a
certain fatty degeneration. It is the business of the.
directors to keep it up to the mark ; to enforce
strict compliance with rules ; to see that no error
goes unnoticed, whether it leads to mischief or not ;
to eliminate every known cause or liability of mis-
take, and to bear in mind the closing words of her
Majesty's Letter, that they have now the monopoly
of the means of travelling.
POST.—The terrible retribution by which the
murder of Mr. Richardson was followed does not
seem to have convinced the Japanese. that they are
not at liberty to slaughter British subjects resident
in their country with impunity. The overland mail
has brought us the intelligence of the commission of
an outrage as atrocious as any of which we have
hitherto had reason to complain, and which has
entailed the loss of the lives of two of our country-
men. Two officers of the 20th Regiment have been
barbarously murdered ; and, although the precise
circumstances under which the crime was committed
are unknown, no room exists for doubting that they
were slain in cold blood. The crime of murder is,
unfortunately, but too rife in almost every quarter
of the habitable globe to render it a matter for
..special comment if a British subject meets his death
in a foreign country by foul means ; but the out-
rages which have during the past few years been
committed in Japan stand on a footing so entirely
peculiar that they become invested with a degree of
national importance. We have obtained admission
to Japan on the faith of a treaty, and we are there-
fore entitled to claim the observance of its stipula-
tions, and to demand that the authority of a Japa-
nese Government shall be employed in protecting
the lives of such of our countrymen as are com-
pelled by duty or business to reside within their
territory. This is in truth the issue which was
raised upwards of two years ago by the murder of
Mr. Richardson, and which is now raised again by
the murder of Major Baldwin and Lieutenant Bird.
That an English subject should be hacked to
pieces by the armed retainers of a Japanese noble,
merely because he happened to meet him when
travelling on a public road, was not to be tole-
rated, and as the Japanese Government were
unable to punish the offender the bombardment of
Kagosima by an English squadron was necessitated
in order to prove to the Japanese nobility that
similar outrages could not be committed with
impunity. The recent murder of two British

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4,542

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17,296
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2.326

695
3.974