imbued with Liverpool and Manchester notions
would have bestirred themselves how to prevent, or at least lessen,
the number of those casualties. They would have set to work to see what
provisions could be adopted to give greater security to travel. We, on
the contrary are too business-like to waste time on this inquiry. We are
convinced that, let us build ships ever so strong, there will still
be shipwrecks. So we feel assured that a certain number of railway
accidents, as they are called, will continue to occur--be as broad gauge
as you will! We accept the situation, therefore, as the French say, and
insure; that is to say, we book a bet at very long odds--say, three to a
thousand--that we shall be rolled up, cut in two, flattened into a thin
sheeting, and ground into an impalpable powder, between Croydon
and Brighton. If we arrive safe, the assurance office pockets a few
shillings; if we win our wager, our executor receives a thousand pounds.

It is about the grimmest kind of gambling ever man heard of; and yet
we see folk of the most unquestionable propriety--dignitaries of the
Church, judges, civil and uncivil servants of the Crown, and scores of
others, whom nothing would tempt into the Cursaal at Ems or Baden, as
coolly as possible playing this terrific game, and backing themselves
heavily for a dorsal paralysis, a depressed fracture of the cranium, or
at least a compound dislocation of the hip-joint.

Now, if the Protestant Church entertained what the Romanists call
cases of conscience, I should like greatly to ask, Is this right? Is it
justifiable to make a contingent profit out of your cerebral vertebrae
or your popliteal space?

We have long been derided and scoffed at for making connubialism
marketable, and putting a price on a wife's infidelity, but it strikes
me this is something worse; for what, after all, is a rib--a false rib,
too--compared with the whole bony skeleton?

"Allah is Allah," said the Turkish admiral to Lady Hester Stanhope, "but
I have got two anchors astern," showing that, with all his fatalism, he
did not despise what are technically called human means. So the reverend
Archdeacon, going down for his sea-baths, might say, "I'm not quite sure
they'll carry me safely, but it shall not be all misfortune--I'll take
out some of it in money."

The system, however, has its difficulties; for though it is a round
game, the stakes are apportioned with reference to the rank and
condition of the