The Sun.
London, England, 1858-08-25 00:00:00

naked and leafless as in December, and the bark is so bruised Mr. Ramsay, of Barnton. The stone bridge which will span
and broken, that in all probability they will die, at least they the Glasgow highroad is rapidly advancing, as is also the
cannot bear fruit for some years to come. Mr. Francis Net-
bridge across the Water of Leith. The latter will consist of
son has also suffered very much, besides several small tenants three arches, sixty feet above the stream. These are both
upon whom the injury will fall as heavy, if not heavier in to be skew bridges. It was the intention of the directors
proportion than upon those in better circumstances. to lay down a single line of rails only, but operations are
Lord Hertford, who receives an immense annual income on a scale sufficient to accommodate if necessary a double
from this estate, will have an opportunity of spending a small line. The distance of the line from the Haymarket
portion of it in a most praiseworthy manner by doing some- branch to Gran ton is 5: miles; but by forming another
thing towards indemnifying the unfortunate victims of this branch—which we understand is in contemplation—run-
unforeseen calamity. Unless something handsome be done ning almost directly eastward from the Granton Junction to
for them, they cannot recover their position for years—some the Caledonian line near Dairy, this distance will be reduced
of them never. No words can give a perfect idea of this by a mile and a half, leaving the total distance only 41
misfortune, which has been unexampled in the history of miles. This, if passenger traffic from Edinburgh should be
this country. established, would render unnecessary the disagreeableness
"Being on a visit here from England, and not having of shunting trains back on to the Haymarket Junction.
seen a full account of it in any of the local papers, I venture The cuttings present no feature of extraordinary difficulty,
to send you this letter, which I would feel obliged by your and it is expected, should the work meet with no unforeseen
publishing in your widely-circulated Journal." interruption, that the line will be fully completed by Christ-
mas twelve mouths. It will run through a fine undulating
country, and will skirt the beautiful Corstorphiue Hill on
the east, forming, if passenger traffic should be undertaken,-
a most pleasant, although certainly somewhat circuitous
route to Granton.
As regards the capital, the Parliamentary estimate of the
cost of the line was £60,000, but the managers have power
to raise, in addition to this, the sum of 124,000. The Duke,
of Bucolanch, we learn, contributes half the amount of
capital.—Scotsman.

RAILWAY IN7'ELLIGEACE.

LONDON, TILBURY, AND SOUTHEND.
The half-yearly meeting of the shareholders in this com-
pany was held yesterday afternoon at the London Tavern—
Mr. Daniell, the chairman of directors, in the chair.
The CHAIRMAN, in opening the proceedings, expressed
his regret that this, like most other railways, had telt the
effects of the prevailing depression, which had very materially
affected the development of traffic on the line. The railway
bad not suffered so much as many others, and he was happy
to say that the decrease in the receipts, as compared with
the corresponding half-year of 1857, was not more than £2Ol.
He was also happy to state that during the six weeks follow-
ing the close of the half-year, the gross traffic receipts were
£1,700 more than in the corresponding period of last year.
From the Bow to Barking branch opened in March last, he
augured the best results, as tending very materially to a
development of traffic.
Mr. KENNELL read the report, which stated that the re-
ceipts from the passenger traffic of the line for the half-year
ending the 30th of June last, which were payable to other
companies, were as nearly as possible as follows, viz.:—Black-
wall Railway Company, £4,184; Eastern Counties Railway
Company, £32,009 ; North London Railway • Company,
£439. These sums, added to the amount credited in the
revenue account (L 21,7119), would give the gross receipts
derived from passenger traffic.
After some discussion the report was adopted.

NEWRY, WARRENPOINT, AND ROSTREVOR.
The report of the directors states that the balance-sheet
shows £94 to the credit of the revenue account. The di-
rectors took counsel's opinion upon the agreements with tiae
Newry and Enniskillen Company, and were sorry to find it
practically adverse to legal proceedings against the com-
pany under its new designation of " Newry and Armagh
Railway," but the directors are nevertheless equally satis-
fied that, however defective the agreements were in legal
formality, they were both prudently devised and honestly
consistent with the united interests of the two companies, a
conclusion at which the directors believe the Newry and
Armagh Company must necessarily arrive before the merits
of that railway can be possibly developed.

DUBLIN AND DROGHEDA RAILWAY.
The receipts of the company for the last half year exceed
those for the corresponding part of 1857 by the sum of £1,629
Os. 2d., while the working expenses are less than those for the
corresponding period by £304 Os. ld., thus leaving an in-
ci ease of £1,933 Os. 3d. in the profits of the half-year. This
result, it is hoped, will prove satisfactory to the shareholders,
when they bear in mind that the receipts on many of the
railways in the United Kingdom show a considerable falling
off, owing to the depressed state of trade. - The net profits of
the half-year, after paying working expenses, interest on
loans, and dividends on preference shares, amount to £d4,029
15s. 7d. To this is to be added the balance of £3,566 10s. Bd.
carried over from the profits of the last half-year, making the
amount at present applicable to dividend on the ordinary
shares of the company £17,596 6s. 3d. Out of this the
directors recommend a dividend of 335. 9d. on each £75
share, and of lls. 3d. on each £25 share, being at the rate
of 4-1 per cent. per annum. This dividend will amount to
£12,755 Ms. 3d. and will leave a balance of £4,840 109. to
be carried to the reserve and reproduction fund. The
shareholders will be glad to learn that the arbitration so long
pending between the Post-office and this company, relative
to the rate of remuneration to be paid to the company for the
postal service, has at length been determined. By the award
of the umpire the company is to receive £165 per annum
more than it has been receiving hitherto. The works on the
Dundalk and Enniskillen Railway have progressed satisfac-
torily during the past half-year•. About the end of June 16
miles of the line—viz., from Newbliss to Lisnaskea—were
opened for traffic. A further extension was opened on the
14th inst. to Lisbellaw. When the remaining four miles to
Enniskillen are completed, there will be an uninterrupted
railway communication between Dublin, Enniskillen, and
Derry, which cannot fail to bring an accession of traffic to
your line. In pursuance of the wish expressed by the share-
holders at the last general meeting, the directors opposed in
Parliament the bill promoted by the Dublin and Meath
Company; and though they were advised and felt that they
had strong and just grounds for opposition, yet they regret
that it was unavailing. It has been found necessary to add
a new goods' engine and six waggons to the rolling stock of
the company during the past half-year ; the cost of these
has been charged to the capital. During the same period
one of the old engines has been replaced, the expense of
which has been charged to the reproduction fund. A con-
siderable sum has been expended on the rebuilding as well as
on the repairs of carriages and waggons. The whole of this
has been included in the current working expenses.

RUSSIA AND CHINA.

(From the Times.)
We suspect that the English public was rather surprised
than gratified by the kind offices of the Russian Govern-
ment in giving us intelligence of what we are doing in the
East of Asia. It is good to know that our diplomatic diffi-
culties are over, and that we may now enter into this land
abounding in silk and tea. Our busy men of commerce
will immediately set their wits working to organise com-
mercial expeditions up the Yang-tse. We shall probably
soon ascertain whether the short staple cottons of the Chi-
nese Deltas cannot be adapted to our looms. A strong
spirit of enterprise, bridled a little by the recollection of
disasters in that quarter now 15 years old, will go forth
eastwards. Manchester will shortly have her correspond-
ents at Wanchau, Sheffield " notions" will have penetrated
to Pekin, Nottingham laces will compete at Soochow, and
Liverpool will import sugars from Formosa. But commercial
and political thinkers will be startled in their calculations
by this ugly fact—St. Petersburg, on the 20th of August,
had news from the Peiho up to the 27th of June; London
has on this 25th day of August no news of its own from the
Peiho later than the 4th ofJune. St. Petersburg, therefore,
is nearly a month in advance of us—a month nearer to Pekin
than we are. In these days,:when intelligenee is money,
power, dominion, life, a month is as a thousand years.
Fancy the effect of a rupture with Russia being known by
Count Putiatin a month before it can be known by Lord
Elgin. Fancy the effect even of some crisis in the tea and
silk markets being known to the merchants of St. Peters-
burg a month before it becomes suspected on our Royal
Exchange. A politician or a merchant who operates with
the odds of a month's early news against him is like a savage
with a bow and arrow contending against a prize sergeant
fresh from the Hythe School of Musketry ; or like the same
sergeant contending against that coming philosopher who
is to kill his man at 20 miles distance by the power of con-
centrated sunbeams. Everything is by comparison. Every-
thing is according to the station held in the great onward
race. The impatient lover who, separated from his mistress,
implored Jove to "annihilate all time and space," was
thought an unreasonable personage; but nothing short of
this will fill the measure of our large desires. If Puck takes
40 minutes to put a girdle round about the earth, Ariel will
beat him out of the field if he does it in two throbs of a pulse.
When the Sirius, 30 years since, steamed into New York
harbour all the city turned out to see her, and the excite-
ment was tremendous; a month hence any Liverpool broker
who should remain ignorant of the price of cotton till he got
it by means of a steamship would be placed in a private
lunatic asylum. We must go on, on, on. We have proved
that we can annihilate space and time, and, having di-
vulged the secret of our capacity, the inexorable necessities
of competition seize upon us, and insist upon our working
up to the full pressure of our power.
We have been beaten by a month. It is not very easy to
say how this has happened. How can it be that news can
speed more quickly by relays of horses than by steam and
electric wires ? ow is it that the passage of intelligence
to St. Petersburg is so prompt ? We know the Russians
have an establishment at Pekin; but it is of a religious and
educational, rather than of a diplomatic character. It was,
we believe, never suspected that .a high road and a chain of
posts existed between the two distant capitals, or that con-
stant communications are kept up between the Pekin Col-
lege and the Cabinet of the Czar. Some time ago we were
given some cause for conjecture by a passage in a Pekin
Gazette, which informed us that an Embassy, sent to con-
dole with the Russian Court on the death of the Emperor
Nicholas, had just returned ; but that information did not
necessarily imply smooth roads and easy intercourse. Here
we have an instance of 6,000 miles traversed in 50 days. We
will assume that the despatch arrived at Pekin in thenr
of a telegram, and that Moscow was the nearest poi to
which it was carried. It is still rapid work. It is not that
10 miles an hour for 12 hours a-day, or five miles an hour for
24 hours a-day, are very fast work for Tartar couriers over
a prepared country. But our surprise is to
took the
the
e
the ea t inha-
bitedmust
country is so prepared. The courier? if h;eit,? d direct
route, must have struck northwards
across-
must have a°ve Qe
e at d v ana
c, ea 1(34 i to the
lug the Great Wall of China,
nt a iba rwaenegne s vast sandyparts
of
cdesertbin interposesawabnicdhtbo!e.m
d this desert in an oblique direction, and, rate the Russian from the Chinese ranges the must
have traverse
sur-
mounting the bills that form its north-western boundary,
be must have ridden over the steppes of the Khirghis, stop-
ping, perhaps, for a short rest in Turkistan. Coursing down
the valleys of the tributaries to the Sea of Lai, and passing
to the north of the Caspian, he would thus reach the fron-
tier of Russia Proper, and might water his horses in the
Volga and the Don as he passed ou his now easy course along
the prepared routes to his capital. Was this his road ? Or
did he strike up northwards from Pekin until he peached
some Russian settlement upon that winding and mysterious
river, the &moor, about which we hear so much and know
so little ? The Americansl tell us of a great commerce grow-
ing at its mouth, and of many steamers plying on its waters;
we know that by a great and most unlucky bend southwards
it descends to within eight degrees of the latitude of Pekie,
and that the Russians have appropriated the great portion
of Chinese territory which is included by that southwatd
sweep. It was by that route Count Putiatin arrived in
China, so we may be assured that it is shorter and not much
more laborious than the sea route by Suez. Russia, it is
plain, has found out a northern vulnerable point, and has
already secured a covered way into this great floundering,
defenceless empire.
The moral of this is, that we Westerns must bestir our-
selves, or we shall be shut out of the new gaine. We must
become a wire-extending people. We have let every nation
get a-head of us in this matter. In England we don't
do things because they are useful, still less because they
are beautiful • but there is nothing on the earth or
under the sea that we cannot accomplish 'if it offer a good
dividend on a large capital. There seems to have been a
hesitation about the chance of making profits by crrrying
messages, and meantime every one hasoutstripped us. The
Trench have covered all Northern Africa with their wires;
how far Russia lies yet carried hers we do not know. But
this China telegram gives us ground to suspect that they
are pushed a long way beyond Moscow. The American
States talk hourly with each' other with these tongues of
lightning; yet we, to whom rapid communication is as the
breath of our empire, have not yet begun even to lay down
wires to Calcutta. Nudged and elbowed by Brother Jona-
than, we have thrown a line across to America; but let any
one compare the Atlantic Ocean, which, so far as it was an
impediment to conversation, we have practically abolished,
with the Red Sea and the Straits of Bab-el-mandeb, and the
Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, and the &rafts of Ma-
lacca and the China Sea. There can be no difficulty in any
of these seas. We have Aden and Calle and Singapore and
Hong Kong as stations—what is to prevent us from payng
not our lines of wire and working our telegraphs ? There
really is nothing to prevent this,
mind is not yet quite sure that the Atlanotictelegraph is a
except !lett the official.
fact, and not a dream, and cannot yettobeeli ve that the work
is so easy as it has been new proved

TILE HEAVY INDIAN MAIL.—The Indian mail
packet Colombo has not yet arrived. If she had not lost her
screw she would have been home the middle of last week.
She has her India and China passengers on board, but her
mails have arrived in England. She was to ba towed from
Gibraltar by a small Government steamer, but northerly
winds prevailed along the peninsular coast by'the last ac-
counts, %illicit would prevent the Colombo from getting
along. A telegram was received from the Peninsula statin
that assistance would be required for the Colombo, and the
Benares, a powerful steamer, was despatched
the to meet
wind
sther,still
and to assist in getting should
her along,
prove contrary. Both the Benares and Colombo are hourly
expected.
MILK AND WATER.—Two French milk dealers
‘rv,uco fo
ereonrhY
Saturdayzi. fined 50f. by the Tribunal of Coreectional
ulg put ;4 per cent. of water in their tt ilk.