Baron von Weber, a distinguished English engineer, predicts that the Channel tunnel between England and France, if constructed, will be the cause of great annoyance to English railway managers, and bring forward some very acute observations in support of this opinion.
The English railway system was a world of its own; it was an insular world which could hardly have been more peculiar if it had belonged to another quarter of the globe altogether. All this, however, will change as soon as the tunnel is pierced between England and the Continent.
England will then no longer be an island, but a peninsula, and although the isthmus which connects it with the Continent will be submarine, its effect on the railway system will be exactly the same as if it were a natural one.
If the importance of the object to be attained by the Channel tunnel is to bear any rational proportion at all to the means required, the tunnel will be constructed only if a very considerable goods traffic between the two shores is expected, besides the large passenger traffic. Such a traffic, which would have to compete with sea carriage, is only possible for goods if shifting the loads is completely avoided, and the wagons and trucks can run from England far into the Continent and vice versa. Now the English exports to the Continent far exceed the imports from it. The English trucks, therefore, loaded with rails, machines, coals, cotton goods, etc., will, after passing the tunnel, be scattered far and wide on the continental railways (whose length exceeds threefold that of the whole British system), and will have to run distances five times as great as from London to the Highlands.
The English railway companies, who are now able to follow their rolling stock almost with the naked eye, who know exactly how long each truck will take to run the short distances in their island, who can, therefore, provide proper loads both for the up and down journeys, hence making the best use of their stock, and who are always aware in whose hands their trucks are, will suddenly see a great number of them disappear out of their sight and beyond their control on long journeys and unknown routes. They will no longer be able to calculate, even approximately, when the stock will return. England will therefore lose an important percentage of its rolling stock, which will be but incompletely replaced by the foreign wagons, which will remain in England a much shorter time on account of the shorter distances. The deficiency will have to be made up at considerable expense. The stock will travel as far as the shores of the Black and Egean seas, to the east coast of the Baltic, to the southernmost point of Italy, and to the Pyrenees; it will pass over the lines of a dozen or more foreign companies, be brought under the influence of three or four different legislatures, police regulations, by-laws, Government inspections, etc., and where three or four different languages are officially in use.
Quite new legal obligations and intricacies will appear if the companies having to forward goods direct into foreign countries send their wagons into the territories of different jurisdictions. It will not be of much use if the English companies attempt formally to confine their transactions to the French railway which joins theirs. Claims from Turkish, Russian, Austrian, Italian, German, Belgian, and French railways will still be brought against them, in some cases requiring direct and immediate communication.
A TOWN OF DWARFS.
A writer in the London "Times" describes the effect of excessive intermarriage on the inhabitants of Protés, a little town in the province of Santander, Spain. Until eighteen or nineteen years ago, the village was quite shut off from the rest of the world. Its inhabitants, from their ever-recurring intermarriages, had become quite a race of dwarfs. On market days the priests might be seen, with long black coats and high black hats, riding in to purchase the simple provision for the week's consumption—men of little intelligence and no learning, sprung from the lowest ranks. About eighteen years ago the Galician laborers, or Gallegos, from the mines of Galicia, swarmed into the town for lodgings, etc., and since their colonization the population has increased in strength, stature, education, intellect, and morality. Their intellects, also, have improved—intellects which had been stunted, dwarfed, and ruined by their frequent intermarriages.