NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.
I find an excellent illustration of the state of modern roads, ‘not blamed for blood,’ in the following “Month’s List of Killed and Wounded,” from the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’:—
“We have before us a task at once monotonous, painful, and revolting. It is to record, for the benefit of the public, the monthly list of slaughter by rail, for the last four weeks unprecedented in degree and variety. In August there were three ‘accidents,’ so called, for every five days. In the thirty days of September there have been in all thirty-six. We need not explain the dreary monotony of this work. Every newspaper reader understands that for himself. It is also painful, because we are all more or less concerned, either as travellers, shareholders, or workers on railways; and it is grievous to behold enormous sums of money thrown away at random in compensation for loss of life and limb, in making good the damage done to plant and stock, in costly law litigation, and all for the sake of what is called economy. It is, moreover, a just source of indignation to the tax-payer to reflect that he is compelled to contribute to maintain a costly staff of Government inspectors (let alone the salaries of the Board of Trade), and that for any practical result of the investigations and reports of these gentlemen, their scientific knowledge and ‘urgent recommendations,’ they might as well be men living in the moon. It is revolting because it discloses a miserable greed, and an entire callousness of conscience on the part of railway directors, railway companies, and the railway interest alike, and in the Government and Legislature a most unworthy and unwise cowardice. It is true that the situation may be accounted for by the circumstance that there are between one and two hundred railway directors in the House of Commons who uniformly band together, but that explanation does not improve the fact.
Sept. 2.—North-Eastern Railway, near Hartlepool. Passenger train got off the line; three men killed, several injured. Cause, a defective wheel packed with sheet iron. The driver had been recently fined for driving too slowly.
Sept. 5.—Great Western. A goods train ran into a number of beasts, and then came into collision with another goods train.
Sept. 6.—Line from Helensburgh to Glasgow. A third-class carriage got on fire. No communication between passengers and guard. The former got through the windows as best they could, and were found lying about the line, six of them badly injured.
Sept. 8.—A train appeared quite unexpectedly on the line between. Tamworth and Rugby. One woman run over and killed.
Sept. 9.—Cannon Street. Two carriages jumped off the line; traffic much delayed.
Sept. 9.—Near Guildford. A bullock leaped over a low gate on to the line; seven carriages were turned over the embankment and shivered to splinters; three passengers were killed on the spot, suffocated or jammed to death; about fifteen were injured.
Sept. 10.—London and North-Western, at Watford. Passenger train left the rails where the points are placed, and one carriage was overturned; several persons injured, and many severely shaken.
Sept. 10.—Great Northern, at Ardsley. Some empty carriages were put unsecured on an incline, and ran into the Scotch express; three carriages smashed, several passengers injured, and driver, stoker, and guard badly shaken.
Sept. 11.—Great Eastern, near Sawbridgeworth. A goods train, to which was attached a waggon inscribed as defective and marked for repair, was proceeding on the up line; the waggon broke down, and caught a heavy passenger train on the down line: one side of this train was battered to pieces; many passengers severely shaken and cut with broken glass.
Sept. 12.—East Lancashire, near Bury. A collision between two goods trains. Both lines blocked and waggons smashed. One driver was very badly hurt.
Sept. 13.—London, Chatham, and Dover, near Birchington station. Passenger train drove over a number of oxen; engine was thrown off the line; driver terribly bruised; passengers severely shaken. Cause, the animals got loose while being driven over a level crossing, and no danger signals were hoisted.
Sept. 15.—Caledonian line, near Glasgow. Passenger train ran into a mineral train which had been left planted on the line; one woman not expected to survive, thirteen passengers severely injured. Cause, gross negligence.
Same day, and same line.—Caledonian goods train was run into broadside by a North British train; great damage done; the guard was seriously injured. Cause, defective signalling.
Sept. 16.—Near Birmingham. A passenger train, while passing over some points, got partly off the line; no one severely hurt, but all shaken and frightened. Cause, defective working of points.
Sept. 17.—Between Preston and Liverpool, near Houghton. The express train from Blackburn ran into a luggage train which was in course of being shunted, it being perfectly well known that the express was overdue. About twenty passengers were hurt, or severely shaken and alarmed, but no one was actually killed. Cause, gross negligence, want of punctuality, and too much traffic.
Same day.—Great Eastern. Points not being closed, a cattle train left the metal and ploughed up the line, causing much damage and delay in traffic. Cause, negligence.
Same day.—Oxford and Bletchley Railway. Axle-wheel of waggon broke, and with seven trucks left the line. A general smash ensued; broken carriages were strewed all over the line, and a telegraph post was knocked down: blockage for four hours. Cause, defective axle.
Same day.—A goods train from Bolton to Manchester started so laden as to project over the other line for the down traffic. Encountering the express from Manchester near Stone Clough, every passenger carriage was in succession struck and injured. Cause, gross negligence of porters, station-master, and guard of goods train.
“Here, it will be observed, we have already got eighteen catastrophes within seventeen days. On September 18 and 19 there was a lull, followed by an appalling outbreak.
Sept. 20.—At the Bristol terminus, where the points of the Midland and Great Western meet, a mail train of the former ran full into a passenger train belonging to the latter. As they were not at full speed, no one was killed, but much damage was done. Cause, want of punctuality and gross negligence. Under a system where the trains of two large companies have a junction in common and habitually cross each other many times a day, the block system seems impossible in practice.
Same day.—Manchester, Sheffield, and Lincoln line. A passenger train was unhooked from the engine at Peninstone, and ran down the incline at a fearful rate. A signalman, seeing something wrong, and naturally confused, turned it on to the Sheffield line. At Wortley it encountered a goods train laden with pig-iron. Smash in every direction, carriages and trucks mounting one on the top of the other. Fortunately there were only three passengers; but all were seriously injured. Cause, gross negligence.
Sept. 22.—Midland Railway, near Kettering. A train ran off the line; metals torn up; traffic delayed for two hours.
Same day.—Passenger train from Chester was descending the tunnel under Birkenhead; the engine ran off the line and dashed against the tunnel wall. Passengers much shaken, but not seriously maimed. Traffic stopped for several hours.
Sept. 23.—A lull.
Sept. 24.—North British Railway, at Reston Junction. The early express train which leaves Berwick for Edinburgh at 4.30 a.m. was going at full speed, all signals being at safety, but struck a waggon which was left standing a little on the main line over a siding; engine damaged, and the panels and foot-boards of ten carriages knocked to bits; no loss of life. Cause, gross negligence.
Sept. 25.—A Midland excursion train from Leicester got off the line near New Street station; the van was thrown across both lines of rails; great damage and delay. Cause, over-used metal.
Same day.—London and North-Western, between Greenfield and Moseley. A bundle of cotton which had fallen from a train pulled one waggon off the line; twenty other waggons followed it, and the line was ploughed up for two hundred yards; great damage, delay, and many waggons smashed: no loss of life. Cause, negligence.
Same day.—Great Eastern, St. Ives. Through carelessness a pointsman ran a Midland passenger train into a siding on to some trucks; passengers badly shaken, and a good many had their teeth knocked out. The account stated naïvely, “No passengers were seriously hurt, but they were nevertheless very much alarmed, and fled the carriages in the greatest state of excitement.” Cause, gross negligence.
Same day.—South Yorkshire, near Conisbro’. A mineral train (signals being all right) dashed full into a heavy coal train. Much damage, but no loss of life. Cause, gross negligence and over-traffic.
Sept. 26.—This was a very fatal day. At Sykes Junction, near Retford, the Manchester, Sheffield, and Lincoln joins the Great Northern. A coal train of the latter while passing the junction was run into at full speed by a cattle train of the former. The engine and fifteen carriages were thrown down the bank and smashed, and valuable cattle killed. Meanwhile a goods train drew up, the signal being for once at danger, and was immediately run into by a mineral train from behind, which had not been warned. Drivers, guards, firemen injured. A fog was on at the time, but no fog signals appear to have been used. Cause, negligence and over-traffic.
Same day.—North-Eastern passenger train from Stockton to Harrowgate ran into a heavy goods train near Arthington. The crash was fearful. About twenty passengers were injured; half that number very seriously. The signals contradicted each other. Cause, gross negligence.
Same day.—North-Eastern, Newcastle and Carlisle division. There was a collision between a mineral and a cattle train on a bridge of the river Eden more than 100 feet high. Part of the bridge was hurled down below; several waggons followed it, while others remained suspended. Cattle were killed; three men badly injured. Cause, gross negligence.
Same day.—Near Carnarvon. A passenger train ran over a porter’s lorry which had been left on the line; no one was injured, but damage ensued; passengers had fortunately alighted. Cause, negligence.
Same day.—Great Eastern. A train of empty carriages was turned on to a siding at Fakenham, and came into collision with laden trucks, which in their turn were driven into a platform wall; much damage done, but no personal injury. Cause, gross negligence.
Sept. 27.—The Holyhead mail due at Crewe at 5.30 was half an hour late; left standing on a curve, it was run into by a goods train; a number of carriages were smashed, and though no one was killed, nearly fifty persons were injured. The signals were against the goods train, but the morning being hazy the driver did not see them. Cause, negligence, unpunctuality, and want of fog signals.
Sept. 28.—South Devon Line, near Plymouth. A luggage train was set on fire, and a van laden with valuable furniture completely consumed.
Sept. 30.—The London and Glasgow express came up at full speed near Motherwell Junction, and dashed into a van which was being shunted on the main line; the engine was thrown down an embankment of thirty feet, and but for the accident of the coupling-iron breaking the whole train would have followed it. The fireman was crushed to death, the driver badly injured, and many passengers severely shaken. Cause, criminal recklessness in shunting van when an express is due.
Sept. 30.—Great Western. Collision at Uffington between a fish and luggage train; no loss of life, but engine shattered, traffic delayed, and damage done. Cause, negligence.
“Besides the above, two express trains had a very narrow escape from serious collision on September 13 and September 26, the one being near Beverley station, and the other on the Great Western, between Oxford and Didcot. Both were within an ace of running into luggage vans which had got off the lines. It will be observed that in this dismal list there is hardly one which can properly be called an accident, i.e., non-essential to the existing condition of things, not to be foreseen or prevented, occurring by chance, which means being caused by our ignorance of laws which we have no means of ascertaining. The reverse is the true state of the case: the real accidents would have been if the catastrophes in question had not occurred.”
A correspondent, who very properly asks, “Should we not straightway send more missionaries to the Kaffirs?” sends me the following extracts from the papers of this month. I have no time to comment on them. The only conclusion which Mr. Dickens would have drawn from them, would have been that nobody should have been hanged at Kirkdale; the conclusion the public will draw from them will doubtless be, as suggested by my correspondent, the propriety of sending more missionaries to the Kaffirs, with plenty of steam-engines.
JUVENILE DEPRAVITY.
Yesterday, a lad named Joseph Frieman, eleven years of age, was charged before the Liverpool magistrates with cutting and wounding his brother, a child six years old. It appeared that on Saturday, during the absence of their mother, the prisoner threw the little fellow down and wounded him with a knife in a frightful manner, and on the return of the mother she found the lad lying in great agony and bleeding profusely. In reply to her questions the prisoner said that his brother “had broken a plate, and the knife slipped.” The woman stated that the prisoner was an incorrigible boy at home, and stole everything he could lay his hands on. A few weeks ago, about the time of the recent execution at Kirkdale, he suspended his little sister with a rope from the ceiling in one of the bedrooms, nearly causing death. The prisoner was remanded for a week, as the injured boy lies in a very dangerous state.
SHOCKING PARRICIDE IN HALIFAX.
A man, named Andrew Costello, 86, died in Halifax yesterday, from injuries committed on him by his daughter, a mill hand. She struck him on Monday with a rolling-pin, and on the following day tore his tongue out at the root at one side. He died in the workhouse, of lockjaw.
[1] I have long since expressed these facts in my ‘Ethics of the Dust,’ but too metaphorically. “The way in which common people read their Bibles is just like the way that the old monks thought hedgehogs ate grapes. They rolled themselves (it was said) over and over, where the grapes lay on the ground: what fruit stuck to their spines, they carried off and ate. So your hedgehoggy readers roll themselves over and over their Bibles, and declare that whatever sticks to their own spines is Scripture, and that nothing else is.” [↑]
[2] See terminal Notes, 1. [↑]
[3] If you don’t know your Scott properly, it is of no use to give you references. [↑]
[4] “Dicimus, et stabilito tenore firmamus, amorem non posse, inter duos jugales, suas extendere vires.” [↑]
[5] He meant the Bible; having learned Evangelical views at the massacre of St. Bartholomew. [↑]
[6] For the present, the daughters seem to take the initiative. See story from Halifax in the last terminal Note. [↑]
FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER XXXVI.
Three years have passed since I began these letters. Of the first, and another, I forget which, a few more than a thousand have been sold; and as the result of my begging for money, I have got upwards of two hundred pounds. The number of the simple persons who have thus trusted me is stated at the end of this letter. Had I been a swindler, the British public would delightedly have given me two hundred thousand pounds instead of two hundred, of which I might have returned them, by this time, say, the quarter, in dividends; spent a hundred and fifty thousand pleasantly, myself, at the rate of fifty thousand a year; and announced, in this month’s report, with regret, the failure of my project, owing to the unprecedented state of commercial affairs induced by strikes, unions, and other illegitimate combinations among the workmen.
And the most curious part of the business is that I fancy I should have been a much more happy and agreeable member of society, spending my fifty thousand a year thus, in the way of business, than I have been in giving away my own seven thousand, and painfully adding to it this collection of two hundred, for a piece of work which is to give me a great deal of trouble, and be profitable only to other people.
Happy, or sulky, however, I have got this thing to do; and am only amused, instead of discouraged, by the beautiful reluctance of the present English public to trust an honest person, without being flattered, or promote a useful work, without being bribed.
It may be true that I have not brought my plan rightly before the public yet. “A bad thing will pay, if you put it properly before the public,” wrote a first-rate man of business the other day, to one of my friends. But what the final results of putting bad things properly before the public will be to the exhibitor of them, and the public also, no man of business that I am acquainted with is yet aware.
I mean, therefore, to persist in my own method; and to allow the public to take their time. One of their most curiously mistaken notions is that they can hurry the pace of Time itself, or avert its power. As to these letters of mine, for instance, which all my friends beg me not to write, because no workman will understand them now;—what would have been the use of writing letters only for the men who have been produced by the instructions of Mr. John Stuart Mill? I write to the labourers of England; but not of England in 1870–73. A day will come when we shall have men resolute to do good work, and capable of reading and thinking while they rest; who will not expect to build like Athenians without knowing anything about the first king of Athens, not like Christians without knowing anything about Christ: and then they will find my letters useful, and read them. And to the few readers whom these letters now find, they will become more useful as they go on, for they are a mosaic-work into which I can put a piece here and there as I find glass of the colour I want; what is as yet done being set, indeed, in patches, but not without design.
One chasm I must try to fill to-day, by telling you why it is so grave a heresy (or wilful source of division) to call any book, or collection of books, the ‘Word of God.’
By that Word, or Voice, or Breath, or Spirit, the heavens and earth, and all the host of them, were made; and in it they exist. It is your life; and speaks to you always, so long as you live nobly;—dies out of you as you refuse to obey it; leaves you to hear, and be slain by, the word of an evil spirit, instead of it.
It may come to you in books,—come to you in clouds,—come to you in the voices of men,—come to you in the stillness of deserts. You must be strong in evil, if you have quenched it wholly;—very desolate in this Christian land, if you have never heard it at all. Too certainly, in this Christian land you do hear, and loudly, the contrary of it,—the doctrine or word of devils, speaking lies in hypocrisy; forbidding to marry, recommending women to find some more lucrative occupation than that of nursing the baby; and commanding to abstain from meats, (and drinks,) which God has appointed to be received with thanksgiving. For “everything which God has made is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be sanctified by the Word of God.” And by what else?
If you have been accustomed to hear the clergyman’s letter from which I have just been quoting, as if it were itself the word of God,—you have been accustomed also to hear our bad translation of it go on saying, “If it be sanctified by the Word of God, and prayer.” But there is nothing whatever about prayer in the clergyman’s letter,—nor does he say, If it be sanctified. He says, “For it is sanctified by the Word of God, and the chance that brings it.”[1] Which means, that when meat comes in your way when you are hungry, or drink when you are thirsty, and you know in your own conscience that it is good for you to have it, the meat and drink are holy to you.
But if the Word of God in your heart is against it, and you know that you would be better without the extra glass of beer you propose to take, and that your wife would be the better for the price of it, then it is unholy to you: and you can only have the sense of entire comfort and satisfaction, either in having it, or going without it, if you are simply obeying the Word of God about it in your mind, and accepting contentedly the chances for or against it; as probably you have heard of Sir Philip Sidney’s accepting the chance of another soldier’s needing his cup of water more than he, on his last battle-field, and instantly obeying the Word of God coming to him on that occasion. Not that it is intended that the supply of these good creatures of God should be left wholly to chance; but that if we observe the proper laws of God concerning them, and, for instance, instead of forbidding marriage, duly and deeply reverence it, then, in proper time and place, there will be true Fors, or chancing on, or finding of, the youth and maid by each other, such in character as the Providence of Heaven appoints for each: and, similarly, if we duly recognize the laws of God about meats and drinks, there will for every labourer and traveller be such chancing upon meat and drink and other entertainment as shall be sacredly pleasant to him. And there cannot indeed be at present imagined a more sacred function for young Christian men than that of hosts or hospitallers, supplying, to due needs, and with proper maintenance of their own lives, wholesome food and drink to all men: so that as, at least, always at one end of a village there may be a holy church and vicar, so at the other end of the village there may be a holy tavern and tapster, ministering the good creatures of God, so that they may be sanctified by the Word of God and His Providence.
And as the providence of marriage, and the giving to each man the help meet for his life, is now among us destroyed by the wantonness of harlotry, so the providence of the Father who would fill men’s hearts with food and gladness is destroyed among us by prostitution of joyless drink; and the never to be enough damned guilt of men, and governments, gathering pence at the corners of the streets, standing there, pot in hand, crying, ‘Turn in hither; come, eat of my evil bread, and drink of my beer, which I have venomously mingled.’
Against which temptations—though never against the tempters—one sometimes hears one’s foolish clergy timorously inveighing; and telling young idlers that it is wrong to be lustful, and old labourers that it is wrong to be thirsty: but I never heard a clergyman yet, (and during thirty years of the prime of my life I heard one sermon at least every Sunday, so that it is after experience of no fewer than one thousand five hundred sermons, most of them by scholars, and many of them by earnest men,) that I now solemnly state I never heard one preacher deal faithfully with the quarrel between God and Mammon, or explain the need of choice between the service of those two masters. And all vices are indeed summed, and all their forces consummated, in that simple acceptance of the authority of gold instead of the authority of God; and preference of gain, or the increase of gold, to godliness, or the peace of God.
I take then, as I promised, the fourteenth and fifteenth Psalms for examination with respect to this point.
The second verse of the fourteenth declares that of the children of men, there are none that seek God.
The fifth verse of the same Psalm declares that God is in the generation of the righteous. In them, observe; not needing to be sought by them.
From which statements, evangelical persons conclude that there are no righteous persons at all.
Again, the fourth verse of the Psalm declares that all the workers of iniquity eat up God’s people as they eat bread.
Which appears to me a very serious state of things, and to be put an end to, if possible; but evangelical persons conclude thereupon that the workers of iniquity and the Lord’s people are one and the same. Nor have I ever heard in the course of my life any single evangelical clergyman so much as put the practical inquiry, Who is eating, and who is being eaten?
Again, the first verse of the Psalm declares that the fool hath said in his heart there is no God; but the sixth verse declares of the poor that he not only knows there is a God, but finds Him to be a refuge.
Whereupon evangelical persons conclude that the fool and the poor mean the same people; and make all the haste they can to be rich.
Putting them, and their interpretations, out of our way, the Psalm becomes entirely explicit. There have been in all ages children of God and of man: the one born of the Spirit, and obeying it; the other born of the flesh, and obeying it. I don’t know how that entirely unintelligible sentence, “There were they in great fear,” got into our English Psalm; in both the Greek and Latin versions it is, “God hath broken the bones of those that please men.”
And it is here said of the entire body of the children of men, at a particular time, that they had at that time all gone astray beyond hope; that none were left who so much as sought God, much less who were likely to find Him; and that these wretches and vagabonds were eating up God’s own people as they ate bread.
Which has indeed been generally so in all ages; but beyond all recorded history is so in ours. Just and godly people can’t live; and every clever rogue and industrious fool is making his fortune out of them, and producing abominable works of all sorts besides,—material gasometers, furnaces, chemical works, and the like,—with spiritual lies and lasciviousness unheard of till now in Christendom. Which plain and disagreeable meaning of this portion of Scripture you will find pious people universally reject with abhorrence,—the direct word and open face of their Master being, in the present day, always by them, far more than His other enemies, “spitefully entreated, and spitted on.”
Next for the fifteenth Psalm.
It begins by asking God who shall abide in His tabernacle, or movable tavern; and who shall dwell in His holy hill. Note the difference of those two abidings. A tavern, or taberna, is originally a hut made by a traveller, or sticks cut on the spot; then, if he so arrange it as to be portable, it is a tabernacle; so that, generally a portable hut or house, supported by rods or sticks when it is set up, is a tabernacle;—on a large scale, having boards as well as curtains, and capable of much stateliness, but nearly synonymous with a tent, in Latin.
Therefore, the first question is, Who among travelling men will have God to set up his tavern for him when he wants rest?
And the second question is, Who, of travelling men, shall finally dwell, desiring to wander no more, in God’s own house, established above the hills, where all nations flow to it?
You, perhaps, don’t believe that either of these abodes may, or do, exist in reality: nor that God would ever cut down branches for you; or, better still, bid them spring up for a bower; or that He would like to see you in His own house, if you would go there. You prefer the buildings lately put up in rows for you “one brick thick in the walls,”[2] in convenient neighbourhood to your pleasant business? Be it so;—then the fifteenth Psalm has nothing to say to you. For those who care to lodge with God, these following are the conditions of character.
They are to walk or deal uprightly with men. They are to work or do justice; or, in sum, do the best they can with their hands. They are to speak the truth to their own hearts, and see they do not persuade themselves they are honest when they ought to know themselves to be knaves; nor persuade themselves they are charitable and kind, when they ought to know themselves to be thieves and murderers. They are not to bite people with their tongues behind their backs, if they dare not rebuke them face to face. They are not to take up, or catch at, subjects of blame; but they are utterly and absolutely to despise vile persons who fear no God, and think the world was begot by mud, and is fed by money; and they are not to defend a guilty man’s cause against an innocent one. Above all, this last verse is written for lawyers, or professed interpreters of justice, who are of all men most villainous, if, knowingly, they take reward against an innocent or rightfully contending person. And on these conditions the promise of God’s presence and strength is finally given. He that doeth thus shall not be moved, or shaken: for him, tabernacle and rock are alike safe: no wind shall overthrow them, nor earthquake rend.
That is the meaning of the fourteenth and fifteenth Psalms; and if you so believe them, and obey them, you will find your account in it. And they are the Word of God to you, so far as you have hearts capable of understanding them, or any other such message brought by His servants. But if your heart is dishonest and rebellious, you may read them for ever with lip-service, and all the while be ‘men-pleasers,’ whose bones are to be broken at the pit’s mouth, and so left incapable of breath, brought by any winds of Heaven. And that is all I have to say to you this year.