The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 13, November, 1858

Breakage of machinery,

Failure of bridges,

Fire,

Explosion.

Those causes which are aggravated by fast travelling are the first, second, fifth, and sixth. The effects of all are worse at high than at low velocities.

The proportion of accidents due to each of these causes, taken at random from one hundred cases on English roads, (American reports do not detail such information with accuracy,) were,—

Collision 56 56

Breakage of machinery 18 18

Failure of road 14 14

Misplaced switches 5

Obstacles on rails 6

Boiler explosions 1

__ ___

88 100

Eighty-eight per cent. being from those causes which are aggravated by increase of speed; and if we suppose the amount of aggravation to augment as the speed, the danger of travelling is eighty-eight per cent. greater by a fast than by a slow train.

These are the direct evils of high speeds; there are also indirect evils, which are full as bad.

All trains in motion at the same time, within a certain distance of the express, must be kept waiting, with steam up, or driven at extra velocities to keep out of the way.

Where the time-table is so arranged as to call for speed nearly equal to the full capacity of the engine, it is very obvious that the risks of failure in "making time" must be much greater than at reduced rates; and when they do occur, the efforts made to gain the time must be correspondingly greater and uncertain. A single example will be sufficient to show this.

A train, whose prescribed rate of speed is thirty miles per hour, having lost five minutes of time, and being required to gain it in order to meet and pass an opposing train at a station ten miles distant, must necessarily increase its speed to forty miles per hour; and a train, whose prescribed rate of speed is forty miles per hour, under similar circumstances, must increase its speed to sixty miles per hour. In the former case it would probably be accomplished, whilst in the latter it would more probably result in failure,—or, if successful, it would be so at fearful risk of accident.

However true it may be that many of our large roads are well, some of them admirably, managed, it is none the less a fact that the greater portion are directed in a manner far from satisfactory,—many, indeed, being subjected to the combined influence of ignorance and recklessness.

Many people wonder at the bad financial state of the American railroads; the wonder is, to those who understand the way in which they are managed, that they should be worth anything at all. It is useless to disguise the fact, says a writer in one of our railroad-papers, that the great body of our railroad-directors are entirely unfit for their position. They are, personally, a very respectable class of men, (Schuylerisms and Tuckermanisms excepted,) —men who, after having passed through their active business-lives successfully, and after retirement, are, in the minds of some, eminently fitted to adorn a director's chair. Never was there a greater mistake. What is wanted for a railway-director is an active, clear-headed man, who has not outlived his term of activity. We want railway-directors who know how to reduce the operating-expenses per mile, and not men who oppose their bigoted ignorance to everything like change or improvement, who can see no difference between science and abstract ideas. It would seem that the only question to be asked with regard to the fitness of a man for being a director is—Is he rich and respectable? If he has these qualities, and is pretty stupid withal, he is in a fair line for election. We tell our railway-readers, that, if they desire to make their property valuable, and rescue it from becoming a byword and a reproach, they have got to elect men of an entirely different stamp,—men of practical experience, in the best sense of the term, who have intelligence enough to know and apply all those vital reforms upon which depends the future success of their undertakings,—the men of the workshop, the track, and the locomotive. And we shall yet see the more intelligent of them taking the place, at the directors' board, of the retired merchants, physicians, and other respectable gentlemen, who now lend only the names of their respectability to perpetuate a system of folly that has reduced our railroad-management below contempt. As at present constituted, our boards are a very showy, but very useless piece of mechanism. The members attend at meetings when they feel just like it, and sign their names to documents and statements which have been prepared for them by others, without much knowledge of what the contents are; their other duties consisting chiefly in riding over their own and connecting roads, free of charge.

Why should railway-directors work for nothing for the stockholders? Ah, Messrs. Stockholders, you little know in reality how fat a salary your directors make to themselves, by nice little commissions, by patronizing their favorite builders of locomotives and cars, and by buying the thousand and one patents that are so urgently recommended! Do you carry your broken watch to a blacksmith or to a stone-mason to be mended? Neither, we think. Why, then, do you leave the management of a work which engineers, machinists, carpenters, masons, and men of almost every trade, have spent time and care upon to build, to the respectable merchant, lawyer, or banker, who thinks the best road that which has the softest cushions and the most comfortable seats on which to ride?

Railroad-building, remarks a late writer, (Mr. Whiton,) may be divided into three periods,—the first, the introductory, in which roads were a sort of experimental enterprise, where the men who labored expected to be paid for their time or money, and were willing to wait a reasonable time for the expected profit. Second, the speculative period, when men were possessed with an unhealthy desire for fortune-making, and, not content to wait the natural harvest of the seed sown, departed from the sound and honest principles of construction and management; trying, at first, by all sorts of pretence and misrepresentation, to conceal, and last by legislation to counterbalance, the results of their ignorance and of their insane desires. Railroads were compared, as an investment, to banks; and it was even supposed that the more they cost the more they would divide; and tunnels, rock-cuts, and viaducts were then as much sought after as they are now avoided. Shrewd and intelligent business-men, who had made for themselves fortunes, embraced these ridiculous opinions, and seemed at once, upon taking hold of railroad-enterprises, to lose whatever of common sense they before might have possessed; and even at the present day these same men have not the manly honesty to acknowledge their errors, but endeavor to cover them up with greater.—The third period is that of reaction, which embraces the present time. To a person unacquainted with the management of railroads, to see a body of men, no one of whom has ever before had anything to do with mechanical operations, assembled to decide upon the relative merits of the different plans of bridges or of locomotives or cars, upon the best means of reducing the working-expenses of a machine of whose component parts they have not the slightest idea, of the most complicated and elaborate piece of mechanism that men have ever designed, might at first seem absurd; but custom has made it right. It is generally supposed that the moment a man, be he lawyer, doctor, or merchant, is chosen director in a railroad enterprise, immediately he becomes possessed of all knowledge of mechanics, finance, and commerce; but, judging from past experience, it appears in reality that he leaves behind at such time whatever common sense he perchance possessed before; otherwise why does he not follow the same correct business-rules, when managing the property of others, as when he accumulated his own? A man who should show as much carelessness and ignorance, when operating for himself, as railway-directors do when operating for others, would be considered as a fit subject for an insane asylum.

When railroads are built where they are needed, at the time they are wanted, in a country able to support them, by permanent investors, and not by speculators, and are well made by good engineers, and well managed by competent men, whose interest is really connected with the success of the enterprise, then they will pay, and be railroads indeed. But so long as money is obtained on false pretences, to be played for by State and Wall Street gamblers on the one hand, and ravenous contractors on the other hand, they will be what they are,—worthless monuments of extravagance and folly.

"Experience keeps a dear school," says poor Richard, "but fools will learn in no other."

Let not the reader think for a single moment that we have no appreciation of the labors of a De Witt Clinton, or of a Livingston, —that we at all underrate the services of the Eastern capitalists who render available the public-land grants of the West, whether to build ship-canals or railroads. We have the highest respect for that talent without which our Western lands would still be left to the buffalo and the deer, and the gold and silver of Europe would remain on the other side of the Atlantic. These capitalists are the mainsprings of the system; but we should no more apply their energy and skill to the detailed operation of so mechanical a structure as a railroad, than we should attach the mainspring of a watch to the hands directly, without the intermediate connecting chains and wheels.

Not less incompetent for the construction of railways, than are the directors for the management of the completed roads, are at least one half of the so-called engineers in America. Obliged to complete no course of education, to pass no examination, they are at once let loose upon the country whenever they feel like it, to build what go by the names of railroads and bridges, but are in reality traps in which to lose both life and money. Indeed, any man (in the United States) who has carried a rod or chain is called an engineer; while the correct definition is, a man who has, first, a thorough knowledge of mechanics, mathematics, and chemistry,—second, the knowledge necessary for applying these sciences to the arts,—and last, the knowledge requisite to the correct adaptation of such arts to the wants of man, but more than all, that experience which is got only from continual practice. We have such a class of engineers, and to them we owe what of fame we have in the engineering world. Second, comes another grade, men who, commencing as subordinates, without any preparatory knowledge, but with natural genius, and an intuitive knowledge of mechanics, need only to have their ideas generalized to see the bearing of their special knowledge upon the whole, in order to rank high in the profession. Third, a class who lack both natural and acquired knowledge, and whose only recommendation is that they are always for sale to the highest bidder, whether he be president, director, or contractor; sometimes working nominally for the company, but really for the contractor,—or in some cases, so debased is this class of persons, for both contractor and company openly. Of late years this prostitution of mongrel engineers has had place to an alarming extent. Let us hope that the old professional pride, and, better still, a love of truth and honesty for their own sake, may yet triumph, and place real engineers high above the dead level to which ignorance and pretence and venality have degraded the profession.

* * * * *

HER GRACE, THE DRUMMER'S DAUGHTER

[Concluded.]

The girl whose suggestion had brought about this change in her father's household, introducing anxiety and tears and pain where these were almost strangers, was not exceeding joyous in view of what she had done. But she was resolved and calm. It was everything to her, that night when she lay down to rest, to know that the same roof that covered her was also spread above the prisoner, and all the joys of youth passed into forgetfulness as she thought and vowed to herself concerning the future.

It seemed, perhaps, a state of things involving no consequences, this sympathy that Elizabeth had shared with the gardener Sandy, when the prisoner's eyes gazed on them from his window, or turned towards them while he walked in the garden; but Sandy said to himself, when she told him that they were to have Laval's place in the prison, "It took her!"—neither did it seem incredible to him when she assured him that the new house was like home. He honestly believed that with the child—child he considered her—all things were possible.

What he had lacked and missed so long that the restoration had a charm of novelty about it, added to its own excellency, was now the prisoner's portion. Good manners, kind and courteous voices, greeted eyes and ears once more. As in the days of Joan Laval, a woman was now sometimes in attendance on the prisoner. But in not one particular did Pauline Montier resemble Joan Laval. She called herself a soldier's wife, and was exact and brave accordingly. She was thoughtful of her husband's charge, and when she paused in her efforts for his comfort and content, it was because she had exhausted the means within her reach, but not her wit in devising.

The effect was soon manifest. The prisoner received this care and sympathy as he might have received the ministration of angels. The attendance was almost entirely confined to Montier and his wife, but now and then Elizabeth also could serve him. She served him with her heart, with unobtrusive zeal that was exhaustless as the zeal of love. Unobserved, she watched, as well as waited on him; and oh, how jealous and impatient of time and authority did she become! Her pity knew no limit; it beamed from her eyes, spoke through her voice, was unceasing in activity. He was to her a romance terrible and sweet, a romance that had more abundant fascination than the world could show beside.

She went up to his room one morning, carrying his breakfast. Her father had been ordered to the barracks, and her mother was not well; the service therefore fell upon her.

The prisoner did not seem to heed her when she entered; at least, he gave no sign, until she approached him, and even then was not the first to speak. Going to the window, her eyes followed his to the garden below.

"It looks well this morning," she said, pleasantly.

"Yes,—but I have seen prettier," he answered.

"Where?" she asked, so quickly that Manuel almost smiled as he looked at her before he answered. He knew why she spoke thus, and was not offended by the compassion of her sympathy.

"In my own home, Elizabeth," he answered.

"Aren't you ever going back to it, Sir?" she asked, hurriedly.

He did not reply.

"Won't you ever see it again?" she persisted.

"Banishment,—a prisoner for life," said he, for the first time explaining to any person his dread sentence.

Elizabeth Montier quietly pondered the words thus spoken.

"If you had your freedom," said she, "would you go back to your own country?—Your breakfast is cooling, Sir."

Manuel looked at her,—she bore his scrutiny with composure,—then he came to the table, sat down, and broke his bread, before he answered this bold speaking.

"Yes," said he, at length. "An honorable man is bound to keep his honor clean. Mine has been blackened by some false accusation. I owe it to all who ever believed in me to clear it, if I can."

"And besides, your home is there."

"Yes."