The Sun.
London, England, 1865-11-23 00:00:00

HERTFORDSHIRE,

At the Watford weekly petty sessions on Tuesday
last, before the Earl of Essex, chairman, and a full
bench of magistrates, Mr. H. H. Burchell Herne,
of Grange, Bushey, and Mr. Joseph Arden, of Rick-
mansworth-park, who, as will be seen upon refer-
ence to the " Law List," are both barristers, and
who are likewise magistrates for the county of
Hertford, severally appeared in answer to summonses
charging them with having infringed an order of
herMajesty'sPrivyCouncil, byeach burying a diseased
cow without first giving notice to Mr. W. Dale, the
cattle inspector for the Watford district. Mr. S. G.
Finney, of Quecusbury-lodge, Aldenham, near
Elstree, Middlesex, also appeared in answer to a
summons charging him with a like offence, and with
removing cattle from where the disease had been
and sending their carcases to Newgate-market for
sale without the licence of the cattle inspector. Mr.
G. E. Eyre, barrister, appeared in support of the
prosecution in each case. Mr. H. H. Burchell
Herne conducted his own defence in person, as also
did Mr. Finney ; and Mr. H. W. Willoughby, of
the firm of Willoughby, Cox, and Lord, solicitors,
Clifford's-inn, Fleet-street, appeared for Mr. Arden.
Each of the defendants pleaded "Not Guilty."
In Mr. Herne's case the defence was that he did
not at first know he had the cattle disease on his
premises, so for prevention he had the beast in
question shot and buried. Afterwards he gave
notice to the cattle inspector, but the bench decided
he had given such notice too late. In Mr. Arden's
case the defence was that a cow died, as he thought,
of the lung disease, and of course it was accordingly
buried by his orders without notice. In Mr.
Finney's case the defence was that, six weeks prior
to any complaint being made of the disease on his
premises, he had a diseased heifer, and sent for Mr.
Dale, the prosecutor, who said decidedly it was a
plague, and so he (Mr. Finney) had the heifer in-
stantly slaughtered and buried, and he had no fresh
outbreak until about six weeks afterwards, when
the disease among his stock broke out again, and he
considered the first notice he had, given to the in-
spector was quite sufficient, particularly as he had
a certificate from a Newgate-market salesman that
the meat so sent to him was perfectly good. These
defences were, however, of no avail. The bench
convicted the defendants, fining Mr. Herne and
Mr. Arden £lO each and cost; and Mr. Finney
two sums of £5 and costs.

WRECK ON THE LINCOLNSHIRE COAST.—The Thed-
dlethorpe lifeboat of the National Lifeboat Institu-
tion was instrumental on the 17th inst. in saving nine men
from the fishing smack Splendid, of Grimsby. The smack
was full of water, and her crew had taken to their own
small boat, which was found approaching the surf, where
she would probably have been capsized and her crew
drowned but for the timely services of the lifeboat. The
cost of this lifeboat was the gift of two attached friends to
the institution.

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heavy expectoration.

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

TIMES.—Much as we have gained by the substi-
tution of railway travelling for more primitive
modes of locomotion, there is much also that we

have sacrificed. We have lost, for example, all the
genial and humorous traditions of the road. A
coach, even when reduced to the utmost regularity,
had something of human nature about it. The
coachman, and even the guard, like all the other
classes of old English society, had special humours
and sociable touches of nature which made them kin

with all their passengers. There was a rough and
natural homeliness about them which made them
human beings as well as coachmen. There was a
predominance, too, of natural life about the coach
which sustained and, perhaps, created this feeling.
The actual machine, the wood and iron, was the
smallest part of the whole. Even the horses were

a much more prominent object than the body of
the coach, and at every 10 or 12 miles they were
surrounded by a suite of attendants, while the coach
itself was almost deprived of its inanimate appear-
ance by the swarm of human life which covered it

inside and out. The travellers in their long
cold journeys felt the influence of so much nu.-

ture and life about them, and grew cheery and
friendly with each other. All these pleasant
features are now completely gone. A railway
offers a scene which is the opposite of this
rough and genial humanity in every par-
ticular. Human beings and natural life are the
least part of it. Iron and wood are now every-
thing. What are all the passengers and the officials

to that vast mass of hard and lifeless material which
rushes with the irresistible force of an unconscious

mechanism over the rigid line carved out for it ?
The driver sitting on the engine boasts of the pace
he goes, but he is little more than the fly in the
fable who sat on the axletree of the chariot wheel
and said, " What a dust do I raise !" The officials

show the influence of association, and merge their
humanity in the overpowering uniformity of the
great machine. There are no human angles about
railways or the people connected with them ; a

moderitte curve is variation they attain
The travellers have little more relation to each other
than to the seats they sit upon or to the partitions
at their sides ; while to the officials they are of no
more interest than the oil which is applied to the
wheels. They keep the machine going, and that it
should be kept going is.the only object to be at-
tained. All this is a real loss, but it is one of the
inevitable penalties we pay for our progress. Civi-
lisation consists, to a large extent, in the substi-
tution of mechanism for human energies and hearts
and hands. But there is one advantage which, at
all events, we might expect to gain from this
mechanical tyranny. A machine is, at all events,
regular. What it does, it does systematically and
punctually. Like a watch, it will work round to
exactly the same place at the end of the same inter-
val. In the same way, whatever disadvantages rail-
ways may have, we might have been expected to
congratulate ourselves that they must at least be
punctual. With an iron road, and iron wheels ex-
actly fitted to it and iron mechanism iu every part,
and the number of trains and their order under the
absolute control of the directors, one would think
that the machine would perform its work in exactly
the time allotted to it, that the trains would pulsate
through the stations with the regularity of the tide,
and annoy us only by punishing the unpunctuality
of human nature. Strange to say, this is the very
point in which railways are most defective. The
other day a correspondent called attention to the
invariable unpunctuality of the Brighton Railway,
and his complaint was supported by a multitude of
fellow-sufferers. It is no matter whether the dis-
tance travelled be long or short. Trains into Lon-
don from Croydon or Richmond or Sydenham are
often just as much behind their time as from Bir-
mingham or York. Indeed, the trains from short
distances are even more unpunctual in proportion
than those from long ones. One' of the most signal
illustrations of the extent of the evil may be con-
stantly witnessed in the suburban traffic at Clapham
Junction. Of the innumerable trains which succeed
each other at that heart of so many railway arteries,
not one, probably, is ever punctual, and the conse-
quence is that the officials on the platform are con-
stantly ignorant what train it is which is approach-
ing at a given moment. A main-line train, for all
they know, may have come up to the last Junction
before the branch train which should have preceded
it, and the whole series of trains may be irremediably
confused. In fact, the hour at which the trains
start on their journeys is now the only time which
is ever observed. Once dismissed from the terminus,
they feel their way along as the signalmen from
station to station will let them, and get to their
journey's end, not when they ought, but when they
can. In short, from all parts of the country, and
from all classes of society, we receive loud and
incessant complaints of the inveterate violation of
this primary duty of railway companies. The in-
conveniences which the railway companies inflict
upon men of business must be beyond calculation.
The great majority of them are those to whom it is
of the utmost importance to be in the City or at
their offices by a certain time. They have taken
advantage of the facilities held out by the railways
to remove their families from town, presuming that
the machine-like regularity of the railway will enable
them to be as sure of being at their business at the
proper hour as if they lived in town and walked to
their offices. They find themselves entirely deluded.
To be ten or twenty minutes or half-an-hour late is
a contingency they must any day be prepared for.
Such a state of things is far more than a fanciful
annoyance. To these men time is money, and they
are thus compelled to acquiesce in a waste which
they would never endure if they were their own
masters. Business in London is notoriously and
scrupulously punctual, and it is disgraceful that the
only element of unpunctuality should be contributed
by the very machinery which ought most easily to
avoid it. It should be remembered, moreover, that
this side of the matter presents what is far from
being the most serious view of the evil. It is un-
questionably to unpunctuality that the greater part
of the risks of railway travelling are to be ascribed ;
and it is not only, therefore, the time, the money,
and the convenience, but the lives of the public
which the directors thus sacrifice to a gratuitous
carelessness. From all these points of view
the evil has now reached such a pitch that
it behoves every one, for his own sake and
for the sake of the public in general, to protest by
every possible means against a constantly in-
creasing abuse. A remonstrance which reached us
in the summer referred the evil chiefly to a foolish
economy of the directors in their staff and mate-
rials ; and there can be no doubt that a portion of
the evil is to be attributed to this case. But the
remonstrants made another suggestion, which
appears to us to point to a still more common mis-
take, and to one which might be at once remedied.
They observe that the public would very much
rather the directors engaged to convey them more
slowly than that they should hold out to them their
present promises and uniformly fail to fulfil them.
No doubt of it; and the greater part of the evil
would be remedied if the directors would act upon
this plain dictate of common sense. They must
know perfectly well that the engagements they
issue in their monthly time-tables are more than
they can perform, and they have no right to delude
the public into taking season-tickets by holding out
expectations which they have neither the power nor
the intention to satisfy. No doubt the times which
they fix for the trains might be easily kept if each
train had the line all to itself and was subject to
no interruptions. But they must now be thoroughly
aware, in the present condition of the traffic on
the main and suburban lines, that every train
is, in point of fact, more or less delayed by the
crush of traffic on the line, and that in calculat-
ing its time it is necessary to take this delay
into account. The case is now precisely the same
with a railway as with a street in London. A Han-
som cab might, if the road were clear, .get from
Charing-cross to the Bank in ten minutes ; but in
practice the road is never clear, and few cabmen
would engage to do the distance in less than half-
an-hour. A railway into London is now compara-
tively as crowded as the Strand, and a precisely simi-
lar allowance should be made for the time required
to traverse it. Take another instance. A gentle-
man observes from the time-books that by a certain
train he can get down to Portsmouth in good time
to catch the last boat to the Isle of Wight. The
train, however, is 20 minutes or half-an-hour behind
time, and he misses the steamer. He remonstrates,
and learns that the case is always the same. The
train is never in time. In short, the directors, with
the best intentions we dare say, have promised more
than they can perform. They must know this quite
as well as the officials.at Portsmouth, and
they have
no right, for the sake of saving their credit in print,
to put the public to all the inconvenience and ex
involve
It which such an incident as this may
It would probably make little cr no difference to
most passengers to start half an hour earlier, whereas
it may be a most serious matter to them to be thus
disappointed. This is a point of management which
can be at once amended, and if the directors do not
adopt a course so plainly incumbent on them it will
amount to a wilful and permanent breach of faith.
Either they must add largely to their staff, and
greatly increase the efficiency of their material, or
they must be content to be more modest in their
promises.
Posr.—The Court of Queen's Bench was engaged
during the greater part of Tuesday in hearing a
demurrer argued in which the point substantially at
issue was one of vast public importance. The argu-
ments will be resumed to-day, but as it is not im-
probable that the court will reserve its judgment,
and as it would be mere affectation to suggest that
the decision would in any way be affected by any

8....-.

comments of ours, we shall endeavour to place be-

fore our readersas succinctly as possible the circum-

stances under which the iniervention of the Court

of Queen's Bench has been sought, and the points

which have been raised for the decision of that tri-

bunal. In the month of April, 1859, the Commis-
sioners of the Admiralty, on the part of her Ma-
jesty's Government, entered into a contract with a
gentleman named Churchward, for the conveyance
of the mails between Dover and the ports of Calais
and Ostend. To the terms of that contract we will

afterwards more particularly refer, but, for the
present, it will suffice to say that Mr. Churchward
agreed to provide suitable steamers for the carriage
of the mails, and the Government contracted to
pay him an annual subsidy of £lB,OOO for his

services. It was further provided that the contract.
should continue in force for 11 years—namely, until
1870. From the date of the contract until the year

1863, it would seem that the agreement was ft-tith-
fully carried out by both the parties to it, and it is
not suggested that any breach was committed either
by Mr. Churchward or her Majesty's Government.
In the June of that year, however, the House of
Commons passed a resolution to the effect that no
further moneys should be paid to Mr. Churchward
for the performance of his services, and the Govern-
ment thereupon entrusted the carriage of the mails
between Dover and the continent to other persons.
The grounds on which the House of Commons
passed this resolution are not on the record in the
Queen's Bench, but those who remember the debate
which took place upon the vote will recollect that
the reason assigned was that the contract between
Mr. Churchward and the Government had been
obtained by unworthy if not corrupt means, and
was such that public policy demanded its repudia-
tion. Mr. Churchward received from the Govern-
ment payment for his services up to the date (June
20, 1863) on which the Admiralty ceased to em-
ploy him, and he now, by Petition of Right, sues
the Crown for damages sustained by him in
consequence of the rescision of the contract by
her Majesty's Ministers. He does not sue for
the subsidy to which he was entitled if he had con-
tinued to perform the contract, but as he estimates
this damges at £126,000, which would have been the
total of his receipts from the Government during the
seven years which the contract had still to run
when it was rescinded, the claim he advances is
practically the same as if he demanded the payment
of the subsidy until 1870. To this claim the Crown
has replied by alleging that the remuneration to be
given to Mr. Churchward for his services was by
the terms of the contract to be paid out of moneys
to be voted and appropriated by Parliament for
that purpose ; that no such moneys have been so
appropriated, and that consequently the petitioner
has no ground of action. To thisplea the petitioner
has demurred, or, in plain language, he asserts that
the non-appropriation of money by Parliament for
the contractor does not deprive the latter of his right
to sue the Crown for damages for the wrongfulres-
cision of his contract. There is also a demurrer on
the part of the Crown as to whether the suit has
been brought by Petition of Right ; but into that
question it will not be necessary to enter. The
most material part of the agreement between
Mr. Churchward and the Government, and that
on the construction of which the decision of the
court will mainly turn, is that which refers to the
means by which the contractor is to obtain pay-
ment for his services. The agreement sets forth
that the Commissioners of the Admiralty will, in
consideration of the due performance by Mr. Church-
ward of the covenants entered into by him, pay to
him " a sum out of moneys to be provided by Par-
liament, after the rate of £lB,OOO per annum, by
quarterly payments," So. Such being the terms of
the contract, the question presents itself for consi-
deration whether the condition of Parliament pro-
viding the necessary funds is to be regarded as pre-
cedent or subsequent—whether, in fact, the contract
ought to be read, " We will employ you if Parlia-
ment will proiride the funds for payment," or, " We
will employ you and pay you out of funds to be pro-
vided by Parliament." In the former instance, it is
conceded on all hands that Mr. Churchward would
have no cause of action for the breach of contract;
but in the latter, which is the construction for which
his counsel contend, it is urged that he is entitled
to sue the Crown for the loss he has sustained
by the repudiation of the contract. Even, how-
ever, admitting the latter construction to be the
proper one, it is contended for the Crown that
the claim advanced against the Executive for dam-
ages is one which, on grounds of public policy, can-
not be sustained. It is this latter point which pos-
sesses the greatest interest for the public at large.
Although the suite is instituted nominally against
the Queen, it is admitted that, if the plaintiff
should prove successful, the damages claimed
would be paid out of the public purse. The true
issue, therefore, which is raised is—whether the
Government of this country can bind Parliament
to pay subsidies extending over long terms of years
merely by concluding contracts to that effect. Now,
if there is any principle more clearly established than
another in the English Constitution, it is that the
House of Commons shall vote all supplies, and that
Parliament shall by a specific act, passed in each
session, direct the manner in which the moneys
voted by the House of Commons shall be appro-
priated. This principle is not only clearly estab-
lished, but was fully recognised in the contract en-
tered into with Mr. Churchward, when it was stated
that the subsidy was to be paid out of moneys ap-
propriated by Parliament for that purpose. And if
it had not been so recognised, and any attempt had
been made by the Government to bind Parliament
to vote the necessary subsidy, the contract would
have been manifestly void. But whilst conceding
the right of Parliament to appropriate the public
money in whatever manner it pleases, it is neverthe-
less contended that the public may be compelled to
pay under another form, namely, as damages, the
sums of money which it would have paid as a sub-
sidy, if the Legislature had not exercised its un-
doubted right of declaring that no such subsidy
should be paid. The principle involved in both cases
would seem, to ordinary minds, to be the same—
namely, that the control of the public money cannot
be taken by Government out of the hands of Par-
liament. It remains to he seen, however, whether
a different view will be taken by the Court of
Queen's Bench.