The route from Mechlin to Louvain, which we passed this morning, is the first of the line of railroads on which we have perceived any striking inequality of surface; numerous cuttings and embankments occurring as it approaches the latter town. Beyond it the alluvial and sandy plains disappear, and the country assumes the usual hilly and diversified appearance, so much so, that before arriving at Tirlemont, it passes under a tunnel of nearly a thousand yards in length. The scenery, too, along the banks of the Dyle, is most rich and diversified, Louvain, itself, being seated on the skirts of a forest, which has evidently been a portion of that of Soigné, at some distant period. Fuel must be here pretty abundant, not only wood being plentiful, and coal at no great distance, but, in the sunk land, I observed a stratum of turf, under the sandy surface, which had been worked in large quantities, and stacked along the side of the road.
Belgium, from its geographical position, not less than the extraordinary adaptation of the nature of the surface, seems to have invited the experiment of supplanting the old modes of conveyance, by an uniform and comprehensive system of railroads. The project was taken up by the government in 1833, and the plan finally executed, was that of taking one point, in the centre of the kingdom, and issuing from it—north, west, east, and south—lines, to maintain a communication with the sea-ports of Ostend and Antwerp, and the great commercial outlets of France and Prussia. It is expected, that on reaching the frontier of these two states, at Limbourg and Couvin, in the Bois de la Thierache, the enterprize would be taken up by private speculators, who would continue the chain to Cologne, on the east, and, on the south, in the direction of Paris. The whole project is in direct opposition to the laissez faire principle of the English government, whose maxim is, to leave everything to private enterprize, that private capital is calculated to grapple with. But Belgium has been so long accustomed, both under France and Holland, to “government interference” in the minutest concerns of the nation, even to the prejudice or supersession of individual speculation, that the habitual policy of the country may have rendered its intervention indispensible. And as the entire extent of all the lines projected, in progress, and open, will not exceed three hundred miles, and these can be completed, at a cost infinitely lower than anything that has yet been attempted in Great Britain, the undertaking is not so very gigantic as at first sight it might appear. One advantage which arises from this undertaking, is that its benefits will thus be extended equally to every portion of the kingdom; had it been left solely to private enterprise, those lines alone would have been selected, which promised to be the most prolific in profits; and other districts, less inviting, would never have been traversed by a railroad at all. But the government, by combining the entire into one comprehensive system, is enabled to apply the excess of gain on one section, to repair the possible loss upon another, and thus extend its facilities alike to all. But private enterprise is by no means prohibited, and in addition to the government works, applications from capitalists have been already granted, to construct branches in the mining districts of Hainault.
The average cost of those already completed scarcely exceeds £8,500 a mile,[8] including carriages and buildings. The most expensive line was that from Louvain to Tirlemont, which, including the tunnel I have mentioned, cost £11,661 a mile, and the cheapest, that from Dendermonde to Mechlin, which, as the level surface of the ground had barely to be disturbed for laying down the rails, cost only £4,583. This, however, is for single lines of rails; that alone from Brussels to Antwerp being yet laid with double, though all have been constructed with a view to their ultimate adoption. The line now in progress from Liege to Verviers, passing, as it does, through a most unequal and hilly country in the vicinity of the Vesdre, will, I imagine, from the numerous embankments and cuttings through rocks, be the most costly yet attempted. The natural facility of the ground, and the consequent simplicity of the work, led to one result very different from our experience in England;—the actual costs of the works, even on the most difficult sections, have not exceeded the estimates by more than eight per cent.
In England, the least expensive line yet opened has cost £10,000 a mile, (in Ireland one has been completed, from Belfast to Lisburn, for less than £7000), but others have cost upwards of £40,000; and the average of forty-five lines, for which bills were passed in 1836 and 1837, was upwards of £17,500 a mile on the estimate, which may have fallen much below the actual outlay subsequently. But, besides the mere facilities of the country; other causes have contributed to render the expenses in Belgium infinitely lower than those of Great Britain; in the former, there were no committees of the House of Commons to enable the solicitors’ bills to mount to 70 and £80,000 for expenses of obtaining an act, as was the case on the instances of the London and Birmingham line, and that of the Great Western; nor were there rich demesnes and parks to be preserved, whose proprietors were to receive the prætium affectionis in compensation for the damages; nor towns to be entered in search of termini, where whole streets of houses and acres of building ground were to be purchased up, at an expense that would prove ruinous to any but the joint-stock capital of a railroad. Their engineers too were enabled to avoid the expense, whilst they profited by the success of the experiments in every stage which were making in England—experiments which were even more costly when they failed.
The fares by the Belgian trains are, from all these circumstances, reducible to a sum much below the cheapest rate of railroad travelling in England; in their first-class conveyances “Berlins” (which were equivalent to the “mail carriages” on our lines, but are now withdrawn), the fare from Antwerp to Brussels was only two shillings and eleven-pence, whilst for the same distance, thirty miles, it was six shillings and six-pence from Manchester to Liverpool. In their present, most expensive carriages, the “diligences,” the charge is two shillings and six-pence, whilst those in England are five and six-pence—and in their “chars-a-banc” or second-class, one shilling and eight-pence, whilst ours are four shillings—they have also an inferior trainstill, “the waggons” for which we have no equivalent, that carry passengers for a shilling. As these rates are something about one-half the old fares by the conveyances which railroads have superseded, the increase of intercourse has been augmented in a ratio that almost exceeds credibility. The number of passengers between Antwerp and Brussels before 1836, was estimated at about 8000 annually, but since the opening of the road throughout, in that year, they amounted in 1837 to 781,250, and though the numbers diminished, as the attraction of novelty wore off, in 1838 they still exhibited an increase of from five to six hundred per cent over the old mode of travelling.
The rate of travelling does not exceed twenty-six miles an hour, and in general does not average more than twenty; and by the statement of M. Nothomb, the minister for public works, of the number of accidents there appears to have been but one man wounded in 1835, one in 1836, five in 1837, twelve in 1838, and seven in the six months to June 1839, when the return was made up. All of these catastrophes are ascribed by the minister to the wilfulness or imprudence of the parties themselves, “no possible blame being attachable to any officer of the company.” One man was drunk, and another was deaf, a third would persist in riding on the balustrade of the waggon, and a fourth stood upright in passing a viaduct, several were killed in looking after their hats; and one formidable accident alone admits of censure upon the officials, when a train returning at night, after leaving King Leopold at Ostend, went by accident into the Lys, near Ghent, the guardian of a drawbridge, which had been opened to allow a lighter to pass, having gone to drink in an adjoining cabaret, without taking the trouble to close it! The engine actually cleared the gulf by its velocity, but was dragged back into the river by the weight of the train, and the engineer and his assistant killed upon the spot.”
As yet M. Briavionne remarks in his work, “De l’Industrie en Belgique,” the receipts of the railroads are below the calculations of these projectors; but this is hoped to be remedied in time by a diminished expenditure in management and repairs; and, perhaps, by an increase in the tarif of fares, which are felt to be lower than is equitable to the interests of the undertaking. Sixty-eight out of every one hundred passengers availing themselves of the very cheapest conveyance, the “waggons,” instead of a fair proportion, as had been anticipated, travelling by the first and second class carriages. The enterprise, he conceives to have been unwisely expanded into the present stupendous system, when the original idea of effecting a rapid communication with Germany across Belgium, independent of Holland, would have achieved the grand object aimed at, with a less expense. This was a sacrifice of solid advantages to ostentation, and has been followed by financial disappointment; but it arose in some degree, from the national desire to give independent Belgium an important prestige in the eyes of Europe. “The Chemin de Fer is then the more popular in Belgium, adds M. B., because the people can see the intimate connexion between its construction and the events of 1830; without the revolution, we should have had no railroad, and without the railroad we should have been better without the revolution.”[9]
Louvain, the Oxford, or rather the Maynooth of Belgium is a miserable, dilapidated old town, with narrow streets and an air of dirt and desolation. Four hundred years ago, it was a place of wealth and importance, the capital of the ancient duchy of Brabant, and the residence of its sovereigns before its incorporation with the territory of Burgundy. Justus Lipsius, himself a citizen of Louvain, and born in a little hamlet between it and Brussels, records, on the authority of some old tradition, that in 1360 there were within the walls from 3,000 to 4,000 cloth workers, who gave employment to 150,000 artizans, (an evident exaggeration in amount, that attests, however, the fame of its past prosperity), and the story adds, that at the hours of meals, the great bell of St. Peter’s was sounded to warn parents to keep their children within doors, lest they should be crushed and trampled by the crowds who were passing from their workshops to their homes! At present, its manufactures are at an end, with the exception of its beer, whose fame is known throughout the Netherlands, its population is dwindled to 25,000, and even within the circuit of the walls, large spaces covered with buildings are now converted into fields or cultivated as market gardens for the supply of the citizens.
In later times, the name of Louvain was familiar throughout the Roman Catholic world, from the renown of its university, which had existed since the year 1426, and was long one of the most eminent seminaries of theological learning in the west of Europe. It contained in the last century no less than forty-three colleges, distributed over the various quarters of the city, and was frequented by upwards of 8,000 students in humanity and divinity, who obtained, at various times, from the emperors extraordinary privileges, exemption from taxes, freedom from arrest, freedom of the city and presentation to the most valuable livings. The bishops of the Pays Bas were ordinarily chosen from the fellows of Louvain; numbers of its members attained the dignity of a cardinal’s hat, and one the Pontificate itself, under the title of Adrian VI. Charles V and his sisters were educated at Louvain. The power and the influence which it enjoyed, however, were not tempered by due discretion, and its houses assuming a right of political interference in opposition to the government, were suppressed and dispersed by the Emperor Joseph II. Under the dominion of France, the university was never restored, as its funds were required for other purposes, but in 1816, the King of Holland, as a measure of conciliation to his Roman Catholic subjects, revived its charter and re-opened its schools.
The principal building, “the Halle” of the university, is situated behind the Hôtel de Ville in the rue de Namur. Some of the minor colleges have been thrown down or converted into hotels, warehouses, hospitals and barracks. Others are still used as the lecture rooms and theatres of the revived university. The Collège des Prédicateurs Irlandais, founded in 1697 by Cardinal Howard, is no longer in existence. Since the revolution of 1830, the University of Louvain has been again remodelled, and its name altered to that of l’Université Catholique, to distinguish it from that of Brussels, which is known as l’Université Libre.