are they consigned and carried away; and if
they have anything to be robbed of, and are
robbed, they have, at least, the satisfaction of
being robbed by their compatriots.

These woeful travellers have been gently
pushed and hustled on shore by hundreds,
and when the last bell-crowned hats have
passed the gangway I am about departing,
when I am informed that there is yet more
live stock to be landed. More! What more
can remain, after all this misery and all these
rags, and all these walking typhus fever and
small-pox hospitals?

As I have asked the question, I must
answer it. There is a great deal more on
the deck of the steamer yet. Pigs more.
Cattle more. Sheep more. Stand on the
extreme verge of the quay and peep over on
the deck of the steamer. Do not turn sick
and rush away in horror, but look. Look
at this Smithfield in miniature; Smithfield,
but infinitely more crowded in proportion;
Smithfield, but ten times dirtier; Smithfield,
with more cruelty, and wanton neglect, and
shameful filth, than you would find any Monday
or Friday morning, between Cock Lane on
the one side and Barbican on the other. Are
you a Common Councilman? If so, snuff up
the balmy, piggy, beefy, muttony gale with a
relish. Are you a slavery abolitionist? Look
on these beasts so scientifically geometrically
packed for economy of space, that every
sheep's leg fits into its fellow's eye, and every
bullock has a sheep between its horns, and
you will have a very apt idea of how herrings
are packed in a barrel, and how negroes are
stowed for the middle passage. Are you a
statist? Speculate on the exact amount of
suffering, the nice quota of torture, the justly
balanced ratio of maddening thirst these
miserable animals undergo during a twelve,
a fifteen, or a twenty hours' passage. Are you
a plain man with a plain English tongue? Lift
it up, and with a will, against the shameful
cruelties of the cattle transit system; against
that monstrous inconsistency which can make
governments and municipalities argus-eyed
to petty nuisances, and stone blind to these
abominations; which can make mayors, and
corporations, and police authorities, strain at
the gnat of an orange-woman or a halfpenny
candle sold on a Sunday, and swallow this
enormous camel. To look at these dumb
creatures panting with agony, their tongues
hanging out, their eyes dilated, their every
muscle throbbing: staggering on their legs,
wallowing in filth, too stupified with agony to
low or bleat or squeak, too sick to move, too
cowed to struggle: is enough to rouse a man of
adamant. Some of the animals are so wedged
and packed together that they are suffocated,
and, not able even to lie down and die, die
standing. Here is a wretched bullock—luckier
than its fellows, for it has some two inches
space on either side of it—lying desolately by
the funnel, with its eyes piteously turned up,
and seeming to entreat slaughter. Nor will
slaughter be long in coming ; for the deputed
slaughterer, nice in such matters, and knowing
to a hair the power of endurance in the beast,
kills it just before it would otherwise die.
The dead carcase would be unsaleable, or at
best would have to be surreptitiously disposed
of ; but, slaughtered alive, it is genuine
imported meat, and fetches its price.
Cheerily oh, cheerily!

THE ENGLISH PASSPORT SYSTEM.

ABOUT thirteen years ago, a Quaker was
walking in a field in Northumberland, when
a thought struck him.

Well! what of that? There are men
walking in fields in Northumberland every
day; and there are Quakers walking in fields
everywhere in England, at all times, and all
with some thought or another in their heads.
What is the wonder of that particular case,
thirteen years ago?

Why, the idea was a noticeable one. It
has produced some rather important results—
results which make that walk in the field a
matter of considerable consequence to
everybody who reads this page.

The man who was walking was named
Thomas Edmondson. He had been, though
a Friend, not a very successful man in life.
He was a man of integrity and honour, as he
afterwards abundantly proved, but he had
been a bankrupt, and was maintaining
himself now as a railway clerk at a small station
on the Newcastle and Carlisle line. In the
course of his duties in this situation, he found
it irksome to have to write on every railway
ticket that he delivered. He saw the clumsiness
of the method of tearing the bit of paper
off the printed sheet as it was wanted, and
filling it up with pen and ink. He perceived
how much time, trouble, and error might be
saved by the process being done in a
mechanical way; and it was when he set his
foot down on a particular spot in the before-mentioned
field that the idea struck him how
all that he wished might be done by a
machine:—how tickets might be printed with
the names of stations, the class of carriage,
the dates of the month, and all of them, from
end to end of the kingdom, on one uniform
system. Most inventors accomplish their
great deeds by degrees—one thought suggesting
another from time to time; but, when
Thomas Edmondson. showed his family the
spot in the field where his invention occurred
to him, he used to say that it came into his
mind complete, in its whole scope and all its
details. Out of it has grown the mighty
institution, of the Railway Clearing House;
and with it the grand organisation by which
the railways of the United Kingdom act, in
regard to the convenience of individuals, as a
unity. We may see at a glance the difference
to every one of us of the present organised
system—by which we can take our ticket from
almost any place to any other, and get into a