Morning journal and courier., 1885-08-24
An EngIishman and HIS Luggage.

From darperS MaSazlne.l
 Probably there is nothing that so much impresses the American on the English rail roads as the apparently defective baggage system. For all that, there is another side to the question, and brief experience of English life and habits serves to show that the baggage check system if established in England would be established for the benefit of travelling Americans alone. The English people do not want it. The Englishman is welded to his luggage and his cab. When he arrives at his station he waits invariably to take his luggage along with him to his house or his hotel He will not be divorced from it for moment No brass check will ever be legal tender for trunk in his eyes. The assurance that it is in the same train with him, that where he goes it goes, that when he arrives it arrives, and that it is there on the top of his cab, or in the cab with him, is to him the essential thing in all his journeying. He has no "express" such as we know in America. Express companies are not possible adjunct of railway corpo- rations in England. He has his cab, his -four wheeler" built especially to carry his heavy luggage on top of it-a vehicle that the American hackman would look down on with lordly contempt, but a powerful engine of economy, industry and public conven- fence. His luggage would go through the roof of a New York hack, crush it like @ paper bandbox, but on the roof of an Eng fish cab his traps, including his bath tub, are railed in and secured, and are in his apartments as soon he is there himself. s'But," you say to the English railway mana ger, ''you have been in America, and you have studied the system there, and you can not but be favorably impressed with it. i" Undoubtedly I was," he replies. q was struck with it's completeness and the extent L-:1 IL of vehicle enables you to carry out such 8 system with perfect ease. It forms 8 kind of natural offshoot of the railway system in America, but it appears to flourish only in your country. It is not and would not be appreciated here. You complain that at the English terminus anyone can claim your lug
 gage and disappear with it. No doubt, if you are slow and they are sharp, such may be the case. and the company may have to pay the penalty; but the English traveller prefers the freedom of the present practice, and would, fancy, wish the check system at warmer place than the United States when any delay arose in dealing with his luggage at the stations owing to the adoption of the check system. The English travellers idea of luggage checking is to have his port manteau safely slowed away under his car riage seat and his smaller articles placed in the rack over his head. I do not see any in superable difficulty in adopting the check system ln this country, but none ot the par tial attempts that have been made in that di- rection have proved successful or popular. :" Americans who spend vacation in Europe not uncommonly form the opinion that the compartment carriages must eventually give place to cars of the American pattern. A merely casual survey, such as the travel of the tourist affords, of the manners and hab- it's of even people as nearly allied to Amer leans as the English does not convey any ad- equate idea of the degree in which the dis functions of class govern matters of the kind
 A railway carriage is a modification of the private carriage, the post chaise, the stage coach and the carriers wagon. Those vehi
 cles have been merely adapted to steam trac- ton and railway schedules, and the conven- tions which characterized their use before Stephensons time remain unchanged in their new condition.