raw material to the Manchester manufacturers, cannot possibly furnish the requisite variety of facts, to enable us to form a positive judgment upon the capabilities of a more inland and extensive track of road, running through or near some of the richest counties in England, and connecting one of our first manufacturing towns with the metropolis. We, of course, allude to the projected London and Birmingham Railway. Here, more extended facts and inferences must be called in. Every one knows that the chief manufactures of the coarser kinds of hardware in the kingdom are got up in Birmingham and its immediate neighbourhood, and that they form a principal article of our foreign commerce; but it may not perhaps be so generally known, that the Port of London is the great outlet for those articles. This it is that renders a speedy and certain communication between London and Birmingham so invaluable both to the manufacturer and the merchant. The increasing competition of manufactures abroad, added to the numerous restrictions which foreign governments have imposed upon our trade in most parts of the continent, and more particularly in Germany, have had the effect of cramping our foreign commerce very considerably of late years, and in no branch more so than in that of Birmingham and Sheffield wares; still British energy has in this, as in most enterprises, availed itself of the utmost of the means at its command, and has made dispatch in the delivery of goods, joined to superior excellency of workmanship, in some degree, counteract the obstacles we have adverted to, as well as others of a more general nature: but the superiority which our merchants thus attain depends upon their keeping up this race of competition, so to speak; for any temporary flagging would most likely take the game irrecoverably out of their hands, at least, under the existing system of trade. Now dispatch, as we have intimated, is essential to the success of our continental trade, or even to its retaining its actual position, which is at present a very precarious matter. To cite an example of what frequently occurs: -the London merchant receives from his correspondent abroad, an order to ship a certain assortment of goods for Portugal, Spain, or the Baltic, as the case may be; in order to reach their destination within the appointed time, they must be put on board some particular ship, and for that purpose, they must be ready for shipment by some fixed day. at the latest; the merchant, calculating on ordinary chances, and finding the order a profitable one, engages himself to execute it by the time prescribed, and, it may be, contracts with the shipowner for its freight; at the same time, he sends down directions to Birmingham and Sheffield for the procural and speedy transmission of the goods. The goods, we will suppose, are too bulky and heavy to admit of their being sent either by coach or waggon, which is mostly the case. They must, therefore, travel by canal, and are liable to some one or other of the following mischances:

the canal may be under repair, of which no notice has been received; or some accidental stoppage may occur to the navigation, to which, from its being confined in one narrow undeviable track, it is of course peculiarly liable; or it may happen to be cleansing time at some part of the line, which is a necessary operation at stated periods; or lastly, in the winter season, the canal may be suddenly frozen. Any of these impediments, and one or other of them is by no means of rare occurrence, lays an embargo upon the order of greater or less duration in the meanwhile, the vessel, which is chartered for some certain day at the the latest, must set sail on that day whether the goods arrive or no; the foreign correspondent is disappointed and disgusted; the ship-owner comes upon the luckless merchant for the freight which he has contracted to pay, who, after all this loss, has at last the satisfaction of seeing the goods arrive to lumber up his warehouse until he can get rid of them, very probably not without a further loss. These untoward events happen quite often enough to throw a damp upon trade; but see how easily and completely they would be obviated by the Rail-road. The merchant, as soon as he had read his order, which for the sake of illustration we will suppose of an urgent nature, would have but to throw himself or his travelling-clerk upon the next locomotive, and six hours thereafter he might be at Birmingham, issuing the requisite orders for the making up of the assortment; in most cases, he might at once calculate to within half a day, and that an early one, the time of the arrival of the goods on the wharf ready for shipment; and that done, he might quietly return to his counting-house the next morning. But it would be ridiculous to display a laboured argument on the advantages which a rapid and powerful transportation of commodities must impart to the Birmingham or any other trade, whether for the purposes of foreign or inland consumption; they may be summed up in two words, despatch and certainty combined; and no man capable of thinking on the subject will refuse his assent to their important nature.

Of all branches of commerce, however, or to avoid any obscurity of phrase, we will say of mutual interchange of productions amongst the people, the supply of food is undeniably the most important, in comparison with all others; it is, as regards the great bulk of the community, like the end to the means. In this quarter the rail-road will do inestimable good. At present the inhabitants of England, of all classes and descriptions, are bound by act of parliament to get their meals from some place or other within the four corners of Great Britain; at least, if they order any thing from beyond its limits, they must pay an exorbitant score for their entertainment. And a good enough ordinary too! we have heard many say. They forget, or they do not choose to reflect, that the abundance or scantiness of a feast depends not alone on the number of dishes on the table,

but also on the eaters, or would-be eaters, who sit around it. Now, here we do not mean to say but that the dinner by itself is a very good dinner, but then the guests are not a few. And somehow it happens, that, after those at the head of the table have been helped, little enough remains for those unfortunates who sit at the bottom. This is a state of things which, in our days, cannot last long without earnest efforts being made to alter it for the better. What the proper remedies to meet the causes of the evil in its fullest extent may be, and how they should be applied or graduated, are questions which must be grappled with before long, but which do not fall within the direct scope of our subject, and we are not inclined to go out of our way at present to discuss them. Suffice it to say, that the distress of the lower orders which we have adverted to, and which unfortunately is so notorious as to be beyond controversy, must eventually, if curable at all, be removed or mitigated by means aiming at one or both of the two following results: either there must be increased means of subsistence placed within the reach of our labouring classes at home, or they must betake themselves to other countries, where those means are certain and plentiful. Now, the railway will be a grand available instrument in both cases. To take a fair view of this part of the subject, we must not confine our speculations within the limits of the intended Birmingham Railway, but we must anticipate the time which, as we are sanguine enough to believe, will, before many years arrive, when rail-roads will be carried through the heart of the manufacturing districts, connecting them with our great agricultural and pasturing counties. Whenever this shall take place, provisions of all kinds will be nearly as cheap at any point of the line of road as at the place where they are produced or reared. At the same time, the reciprocal benefits to the land owners and land cultivators will be immense. No one needs to be told that provisions are, almost without exception, bulky and quickly spoilt. At present, their bulk renders a rapid carriage impracticable from its cost, whilst a slow one, by spoiling most articles, would be only a mode of throwing them away. To the driving of cattle, sheep, or pigs, indeed these impediments do not apply in the same shape, but they do in another. When fatted, they can only be driven a limited number of miles, and that at a considerable expense, and with very great loss of weight and deterioration of quality. It will hardly be believed that the mere loss of animal substance from the cattle and sheep alone driven to Smithfield market, expressed in money, exceeds the annual sum of £600,000!

Now the rail-road possesses precisely the properties required to supply the foregoing deficiencies. Upon it all bulky and unwieldy bodies may be conveyed with nearly equal facility and speed as the lightest. Any number of oxen, calves, sheep, or

pigs, reared within a moderate distance of any part of the track, may be placed in appropriate vehicles (already in use,) and whirled off to their destination in a few hours, without being spent and exhausted by fatigue and want of food, or harassed by the brutalities of the drover. But, in all probability, the greater quantity of butcher's meat would be killed in the country to save room and charge of transport, and to gain the offal. Besides all this, milk, butter, eggs, fruit, vegetables, and all other perishable produce, would be brought to market from an area four or five times larger than the present rate of conveyance will admit of, with of course a corresponding abundance of supply. We must here observe, that nothing could be further from our meaning than to infer that it is this existing want of transport for provisions which occasions their high prices, and shuts out the poor from all but a scanty portion of the coarser kinds of food. The cause unquestionably lies much deeper, and, therefore, if every thing else remained the same, the introduction of railways would certainly do but little towards increasing the capacity of the poor to procure a more plentiful supply of provisions and of a better sort; but coupled with a modification of the corn laws, (the expediency of which we are not now going to discuss, but which every body looks forward to as probable, not to say unavoidable,) we are very sure that the power which a rail-road would afford of pouring, without limit, the productions of the country into the midst of the dense population of towns and manufacturing districts, must necessarily lower their price to the consumers, whilst the new and almost boundless markets for every species of produce of the land which would be thereby created, would do more than compensate the landowner for any portion of his existing monopoly which he may be called upon to relinquish.

But let all be done that may be done for the bettering the condition of the lower orders, and still we fear that pauperism has grown to so fearful a head amongst us, that with our condensed population in particular parts, and our artificially constructed state of society, no augmented supply of food which it would be practicable under these circumstances to throw in, would produce the desired beneficial effect, without being accompanied by a large reduction of the numbers of the poor, through the means of a judiciously worked system of emigration. There cannot be a more efficacious part of the machinery required for such a work, than a cheap and speedy land carriage to the outport where the emigrants are to embark.

One of the chief reasons why so little good has been hitherto accomplished in emigration, whilst so much has been talked about, has been the difficulty or the disinclination, we care not which, to bring about an extensive cooperation of parishes

throughout the kingdom, so that a very large number of paupers willing to emigrate might be dismissed at once; for it is only in large masses that emigration can do good, by driblets it unquestionably works evil. Now see how effectually a Railway to the outport would come in aid to the attainment of the desired object.

We obviously cannot but allude conjecturally to the other parts of the system; but supposing it to be taken up by government, there would of course be a board in London and an office at the out port, (say Liverpool, as emigration chiefly flows towards America,) and one or both of these might be placed in correspondence with the churchwardens of every parish in the kingdom, through the intervention possibly of the receivers of taxes in each county: the government might then contract with the Railway proprietors for the conveyance of pauper emigrants, as it doubtless would for the mail. These arrangements being made, it might only be necessary for the churchwardens of any parish to place in the hands of any individual or family desirous of emigrating a certificate or pass to that effect, together with sufficient provisions to take the parties to the nearest station on the Rail-road: arrived there, the emigrants might, on producing their pass, be assigned places in the passing train of carriages, which in a few hours would take them to Liverpool: there they might be received and accommodated in a public establishment provided for the purpose until they were shipped off to America. The arrangements might be of such a nature that where a man could not be trusted, not a shilling of money need be left in his hands, and the accounts might be very easily liquidated at all times between the government and the individual parishes, through the intervention of the

receivers of the taxes.

We have, in our last observations, calculated upon an uninterrupted Railway from London to Liverpool; and, in fact, such a work would be nearly simultaneous, since a bill for a Railway to be continued from Birmingham to Liverpool would have been immediately introduced into Parliament, if that from London to Birmingham had passed the Lords. The entire line, when completed, will bring Birmingham within less than six, and Liverpool within ten hours' distance of London. And traversing from off the Rail, at the points nearest to Shrewsbury and Chester, the former might be reached in about nine hours and a half, and the latter, being much nearer to the track, in little more than ten !

Some of our compatriots may possibly ask, what has Wales to do with all our foregoing peroration? It would be a short-sighted question. Wales is an integral part of England, and must necessarily partake of every thing bringing weal or woe to the latter. It might as well be asked, what the circulation of the