“Them’s the cords that hung John Tawell!”

Having now concluded a rough outline of the practical working of the electric telegraph, it is necessary that we should state—as an important fact on which we offer no comment—that the Company has made arrangements with all the railway companies for working their wires, excepting with the South-Eastern, and, accordingly, that the electric communication between London and Dover is worked by itself, and without connexion with the general system.

The wires of the electric telegraph from the various lines of railway, carried under the streets, and concentrated at the central station in London, transmit private messages and answers to and from the following places:—

CHAPTER XIV.

Railway Clearing-House.

It is a curious fact that human ignorance, and especially good honest homespun English ignorance, often produces important and highly beneficial results. “If I had but known what I have had to contend with I would never have undertaken the job,” is a remark which many a poor emigrant, many a weary traveller, many a journeyman labourer in every department of life, has fervently muttered to himself. The ejaculation is particularly applicable to the original projectors of our railways, who, had they but known the hydra-headed difficulties which, one after another, they would have to encounter, would most surely have kept their money in their pockets, or, in the phraseology of the vulgar, “would never have undertaken the job.”

Besides the difficulty of raising money, which during the railway mania certainly amounted to nil, there were parliamentary difficulties, engineering difficulties, difficulties of management of various descriptions; and yet, when all these were overcome, when each railway, with its beautiful system of committee-men, secretaries, engineers, surveyors, station-masters, engine-drivers, stokers, pokers, guards, police, superintendents, artificers, labourers, &c., was fully organised and completed, and every line competent along the whole or any portion of its length to convey with safety and due attention every description of traffic, there suddenly appeared a new difficulty, which not only most seriously embarrassed, but which threatened almost to prevent, the combined action of the vertebral railways which at such trouble and cost had just been created. The difficulty alluded to was what is now commonly called “the through traffic.”

Even before the railway system came into full operation, it was soon found, that to conciliate, or rather to satisfy the just claims of the passenger public, it would be necessary not to harass warm “through” travellers by forcing them to migrate to cold carriages as often as, asleep or awake, dozing or dreaming, they reached each terminus of the various railway companies who, in enmity rather than in partnership, were the proprietors of the consecutive portions of the thoroughfare line.