Chamberss Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 | Page 5

expedite the
overland route, so far as concerns the transit along this canal, that the
railway now in process of construction has been planned; anything
beyond this, it will be for future ages to develop. The subject of the
Isthmus of Suez and its transit has been frequently treated in this
Journal, and we will therefore say nothing more here, than that our
friend Bradshaw will, in all probability, have something to tell us
concerning the land of Egypt before any long time has elapsed.

Asia will have a spider-line of railway by and by, when the slow-coach
proceedings of the East India Company have given something like form
to the Bombay and Bengal projects; but at present the progress is
miserably slow; and Bradshaw need not lay aside a page for the rich
Orient for many years to come.
There are a few general considerations respecting the present aspect of
the railway system, interesting not only in themselves, but as giving a
foretaste of what is to come. In the autumn of last year, a careful
statistician calculated that the railways of Europe and America, as then
in operation, extended in the aggregate to 25,350 miles, the total cost of
which was four hundred and fifty millions of pounds. Of this, the
United Kingdom had 7000 miles, costing L.250,000,000. According to
the view here given, the 7000 miles of our own railways have been
constructed at an expense prodigiously greater than the remaining
18,350 miles in other parts of the world. It needs no figures to prove
that this is the fact. Many of the continental and American railways are
single lines, and so far they have been got up at a comparatively small
cost. But the substantial difference of expense lies in our plan of
leaving railway undertakings to private parties--rival speculators and
jobbers, whose aim has too frequently been plunder. And how
enormous has been that plunder let enriched engineers and lawyers--let
impoverished victims--declare. Shame on the British legislature, to
have tolerated and legalised the railway villainies of the last ten years;
in comparison with which the enforcements of continental despotisms
are angelic innocence!
Besides being got up in a simple and satisfactory manner, under
government decrees and state responsibility, the continental railways
are evidently more under control than those of the United Kingdom.
The speed of trains is regulated to a moderate and safe degree; on all
hands there seems to be a superior class of officials in charge; and as
the lines have been made at a small cost, the fares paid by travellers are
for the most part very much lower than in this country. Government
interference abroad is, therefore, not altogether a wrong. Annoying as it
may sometimes be, and bad as it avowedly is in principle, there is in it
the spirit of protection against private oppression. And perhaps the

English may by and by discover that jobbing-companies, with
stupendous capital and a monopoly of conveyance, are capable of doing
as tyrannical things as any continental autocrat!
If a section of the English public stands disgraced in the eyes of Europe
by its vicious speculation--properly speaking, gambling--in railway
finance, our country is in some degree redeemed from obloquy by the
grandeur of a social melioration which jobbing has not been able to
obstruct. The wide spread of railways over the continent, we have said,
is working a perceptible change in almost all those arrangements which
bear on the daily comforts of life. No engine of a merely physical kind
has ever wrought so powerfully to secure lasting international peace as
the steam-engine. The locomotive is every hour breaking down barriers
of separation between races of men. And as wars in future could be
conducted only by cutting short the journeys by railway, arresting
trains, and ruining great commercial undertakings, we may expect that
nations will pause before rushing into them. Already, the French
railways, which push across the frontier into the German countries, are
visibly relaxing the custom-house and passport systems. Stopping a
whole train at an imaginary boundary to examine fifteen hundred
passports, is beyond even the French capacity for official minutiæ. A
hurried glance, or no glance at all--a sham inspection at the best--is all
that the gentlemen with moustaches and cocked-hats can manage. The
very attempt to look at bushels of passports is becoming an absurdity.
And what has to be done in the twinkling of an eye, will, we have no
doubt, soon not be done at all. Thanks to railways for this vast privilege
of free locomotion!

A NEW PRINCIPLE IN NATURE.
It is pretty well known that researches by Matteucci, Du Bois-Reymond,
and others, have made us acquainted with the influence of electricity
and galvanism on the muscular system of animals, and that important
physiological effects have