delay at the end of a journey while he stands in
the large bare room of the Paris terminus waiting
for his luggage to be searched!

We have already made one great move
towards mitigating the difficulties of travelling in
organising the system of registering our luggage
through from one great. town to another. Time
was when the agonised voyager, with his brain
reeling and his stomach revolving at the moment
of his reaching the pier of Calais, or that of
Dover, was compelled to open his boxes with
one hand while he beat his breast in the torment
of sickness with the other; and sometimes he
would even have to go through the searching
process on the pier itself, unsheltered from the
pitiless blast. All this is altered now. Much
has been done, but something remains yet to be
achieved, and the Minister of the Interior would
gladly inaugurate his entry into office by facilitating
yet more our personal communication
with the Continent.

There are some, perhaps, who might imagine
that the Minister was about to propose the
doing away with the Custom-house search
altogether, and letting it go the way of the
passports. This, however, is not his intention. A
man certainly might inquire whether that search,
as at present conducted, is of much use, and
whether, tiresome and inconvenient as it is, it is
not, in great measure, a mere form? When the
officer commences his search, what is his usual
manner of proceeding? When he has, after
some consideration, fixed upon the most guilty
looking of our portmanteaus, and has directed
it to be opened, what does he do? He slightly
lifts up the two spotless shirts which lie at the
top, and having satisfied himself that we are
possessed of that amount of clean linen, he
desists, and the remainder of our baggage, on
the strength of those shirts, is allowed to go
through with such glory that it really forces
the conviction on our mind that your genuine
smuggler invariably travels without "a change."
There is certainly another class of officer, whose
search is of a different type, and who,
unconvinced by the shirts, proceeds to press heartily
with his hand what lies beneath those articles;
but, after all, he is quite satisiied if the
substratum is soft and springy; and what is such a
search as this good for? Does he expect the
smuggled article to squeak on pressure like a
toy dog?  Are all contraband things hard and
knobby? Do they all offer resistance to a fond
and gentle pressure? Surely Brussels lace and
French cambric are neither knobby nor hard.

We will not, however, go into this question
of the utility of the Custom-house search. The
time may come when it shall be done away with,
just as the time may come when there shall be
no more indirect taxation. But it is not yet.
The proposal of the MInister of the Interior is a
very simple one, and involves no such sweeping
alteration as that abolishing of the Douane
altogether, which would afford the traveller so
much pleasure, but which is, for the present at
least, impossible.

What the writer would suggest, then, is this.
To carry one step farther the system of registering
the baggage which is to be transported from
one country to another, and to let it be examined
before it is sent off rather than on its arrival.
This is all; let the search take place at the
commencement of the journey instead of at its
termination. If the traveller is going from
London to Paris, let the examination of his
baggage, be made by a representative of the
French Custom-house in London before he sets
off; while if, on the other hand, he is travelling
from Paris to London, it, should be searched by
an English official before it is put into the van.

The advantage of this plan over the present
system would, as far as the comfort of the
traveller is concerned, be very great. He would
go through this ordeal when he is fresh and in
good condition, instead of at a time when he is
totally exhausted in mind and body; an
additional and distressing source of delay when he
has arrived at his journey's end would be done
away with; and he would perform his voyage
with the delightful feeling that he "had got it
over," and we all know— all who have ever had
a tooth out, or made a morning call—that that
sensation is one of the most blissful to which
humanity is subject.

Of course this arrangement could not— any
more than the luggage registration does— meet
every case. It would be impossible to have the
Customs of the different European nations
represented at every railway station; but at the
great central termini at London, Paris, Brussels,
Marseilles— these officials might be in
readiness, and that would meet the difficulty to so
great an extent, that what remained undone
would be nothing compared to the gain we
should have achieved.

The practical working of this system would be
simple enough. When the examiner has made
his search —more or less rigorous, as the case
might be— he would fix his seal upon the pack
and it would be at once transferred to the van, to
be opened no more till it reaches its destination,
as is the case already with registered luggage.
No parcel taken up at some place on the road
could be smuggled through, for the plain reason
that it would want the seal. To imitate that
seal would be the same offence as to imitate a
railway ticket—simple forgery.

  An experiment might be tried to begin with,
at London and Paris only. We should want
here, at first, representatives of the French and
Belgian Custom-houses, whilst in Paris it would
be desirable to have a larger staff, and Italy,
Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, and England,
should have their Douaniers at the termini of
the different railway lines which lead to those
countries from Paris.

   Were this system adopted, what a load would
be removed from our minds as we recline on the
cushions of the railway carriage, or yearn in
anguish at the steamer's bulwarks. The
bewildering cries of porters, of hotel touters, and
commissionnaires awaiting us at our journey's
end, would be a simple nuisance, and not one
that is complicated with the Douanier's visit into