t be carried so far as to cover with a mantle of
justice _all_ the railway concessions of America!

Two things in the American parlour-car system struck me as evils that
were not only unnecessary, but easily avoidable. The first of these is
that most illiberal regulation which compels the porter to let down
the upper berth even when it is not occupied. The object of this is
apparently to induce the occupant of the lower berth to hire the whole
"section" of two berths, so as to have more ventilation and more room
for dressing and undressing. Presumably the parlour-car companies know
their own business best; but it would seem to the average "Britisher"
that such a petty spirit of annoyance would be likely to do more harm
than good, even in a financial way. The custom would be more excusable
if it were confined to those cases in which two people shared the
lower berth. The custom is so unlike the usual spirit of the United
States, where the practice is to charge a liberal round sum and then
relieve you of all minor annoyances and exactions, that its
persistence is somewhat of a mystery.

The continuance of the other evil I allude to is still less
comprehensible. The United States is proverbially the paradise of what
it is, perhaps, now behind the times to term the gentler sex. The path
of woman, old or new, in America is made smooth in all directions, and
as a rule she has the best of the accommodation and the lion's share
of the attention wherever she goes. But this is emphatically not the
case on the parlour car. No attempt is made there to divide the sexes
or to respect the privacy of a lady. If there are twelve men and four
women on the car, the latter are not grouped by themselves, but are
scattered among the men, either in lower or upper berths, as the
number of their tickets or the courtesy of the men dictates. The
lavatory and dressing-room for men at one end of the car has two or
more "set bowls" (fixed in basins), and can be used by several
dressers at once. The parallel accommodation for ladies barely holds
one, and its door is provided with a lock, which enables a selfish
bang-frizzler and rouge-layer to occupy it for an hour while a queue
of her unhappy sisters remains outside. It is difficult to see why a
small portion at one end of the car should not be reserved for ladies,
and separated at night from the rest of the car by a curtain across
the central aisle. Of course the passage of the railway officials