conduct, but to burn or crush a whole | with the customary penalties against train merely to prevent a few immoral the companies for disobedience of insides from not paying, is I hope a orders, and then the board may use little more than Ripon or Gladstone this power as the occasion may require. will bear.

We have been, up to this point, very careless of our railway regulations. The first person of rank who is killed will put everything in order, and produce a code of the most careful rules. I hope it will not be one of the bench of bishops; but should it be so destined, let the burnt bishop-the unwilling Latimer. - remember that, however painful gradual concoction by fire may be, his death will produce unspeakable benefit to the public. Even Sodor and Man will be better than nothing. From that moment the bad effects of the monopoly are destroyed; no more fatal deference to the directors; no despotic incarceration, no barbarous inattention to the anatomy and physiology of the human body; no commitment to locomotive prisons with warrant. We shall then find it possible

"Voyager libre sans mourir."

June 7, 1842.

SYDNEY SMITH.

BURNING ALIVE ON RAIL-
ROADS.

To the Editor of the Morning Chronicle.

To pass a one-legged law, giving power over one door and not the other, would, perhaps, be too absurd for human endurance. If railroad companies were aware of their real and extended interests, they would not harass the public by vexatious regulations, nor, under the plea of humanity (though really for purposes of economy), expose them to serious peril. The country are very angry with themselves for having granted the monopoly, and very angry for the instances of carelessness and oppression which have appeared in the working of the system: the heaviest fines are inflicted by coroner's juries, the heaviest damages are given by common juries. Railroads have daily proofs of their unpopularity. If Parliament get out of temper with these metallic ways, they will visit them with Laws of Iron, and burst upon them with the high pressure of despotism.

The wayfaring men of the North will league with the wayfaring men of the West; South and East will join hand in hand against them. All the points of the compass will combine against these vendors of velocity, and traders in transition. I hope a clause will be introduced, compelling the Board of Trade to report twice a year to Parlia ment upon the accidents of railroads, their causes, and their prevention. SIR, The public know little or nothing of HAVING gradually got into this little what happens on the rail. All the controversy respecting the burning hu- men with letters upon the collars of man beings alive on the railroads, I their coats are sworn to secrecy. must beg leave, preparatory to the in-nothing can be extracted from them; troduction of the bill, to say a few more when anything happens they neither words on the subject. If I could have appear to see nor hear you. my will in these matters, I would introduce into the bill a clause abso-be to them as so many joints on the lutely prohibitory of all locking doors on railroads; but as that fascinating board, the Board of Trade, does not love this, and as the public may, after some repetitions of roasted humanity, be better prepared for such peremptory legislation, the better method perhaps will be to give to the Board of Trade the power of opening doors (one or both),

In case of conflagration, you would

spit. It has occurred to 500 persons, that soft impediments behind and before (such as wool) would prevent the dangers of meeting or overtaking. It is not yet understood why a carri age on fire at the end of the train cannot be seen by the driver of the engine. All this may be great nonsense; but the public ought to know that these

points have been properly considered; instead of wrapping themselves up in they should know that there are a set transcendental philosophy, and the of officers paid to watch over their in- principles of letting-aloneness, why do terests, and to guard against the per- they not at once do what ought to be petual encroachments, the carelessness, done- - what must be done-and the insolence, and the avarice of mo- what, after many needless butcheries, nopoly. they will at last be compelled to do? — Yours,

Why do not our dear Ripon our youthful Gladstone see this, come cheerfully to the rescue?

and

LETTERS,

ON

ETC.

AMERICAN DEBT S.

the Union, after the wise investment of the borrowed money in roads and canals, of which the repudiators are every day reaping the advantage. It is an act of bad faith which (all its circumstances considered) has no parallel, and no excuse.

Nor is it only the loss of property which your Petitioner laments; he

THE HUMBLE PETITION of the REV. SYDNEY SMITH to the HOUSE OF CONGRESS at WASHINGTON. I PETITION your honourable House to institute some measures for the restoration of American credit, and for the repayment of debts incurred and repudiated by several of the States. Your Petitioner lent to the State of laments still more that immense power Pennsylvania a sum of money, for the which the bad faith of America has purpose of some public improvement. given to aristocratical opinions, and The amount, though small, is to him to the enemies of free institutions, in important, and is a saving from a life the old world. It is in vain any longer income, made with difficulty and pri- to appeal to history, and to point out vation. If their refusal to pay (from the wrongs which the many have rewhich a very large number of English ceived from the few. The Americans, families are suffering) had been the who boast to have improved the instiresult of war, produced by the unjust tutions of the old world, have at least aggression of powerful enemies; if it equalled its crimes. A great nation, had arisen from civil discord; if it after trampling under foot all earthly had proceeded from an improvident tyranny, has been guilty of a fraud as application of means in the first years enormous as ever disgraced the worst of self-government: if it were the act king of the most degraded nation of of a poor State struggling against the Europe. barrenness of nature-every friend of America would have been contented to wait for better times; but the fraud is committed in the profound peace of Pennsylvania, by the richest State in

It is most painful to your Fetitioner to see that American citizens excite, wherever they may go, the recollection that they belong to a dishonest people, who pride themselves on having tricked

and pillaged Europe; and this mark is fixed by their faithless legislators on some of the best and most honourable men in the world, whom every Englishman has been eager to see and proud to receive.

It is a subject of serious concern to your Petitioner that you are losing all that power which the friends of freedom rejoiced that you possessed, looking upon you as the ark of human happiness, and the most splendid picture of justice and of wisdom that the world had yet seen. Little did the friends of America expect it, and sad is the spectacle to see you rejected by every State in Europe, as a nation with whom no contract can be made, because none will be kept; unstable in the very foundations of social life, deficient in the elements of good faith, men who prefer any load of infamy however great, to any pressure of taxation however light.

Nor is it only this gigantic bankruptcy for so many degrees of longitude and latitude which your Petitioner deplores, but he is alarmed also by that total want of shame with which these things have been done; the callous immorality with which Europe has been plundered, that deadness of the moral sense which seems to preclude all return to honesty, to perpetuate this new infamy, and to threaten its extension over every State of the Union.

out the greatest of all political problems, and upon that confederacy the eyes of thinking men are intensely fixed, to see how far the mass of mankind can be trusted with the management of their own affairs, and the establishment of their own happiness. May 18, 1843.

LETTER I.

To the Editor of the Morning Chronicle.

SIR,

:

You did me the favour, some time since, to insert in your valuable journal a petition of mine to the American Congress, for the repayment of a loan made by me, in common with many other unwise people, to the State of Pennsylvania. For that petition I have been abused in the grossest manner by many of the American papers. After some weeks' reflection, I see no reason to alter my opinions, or to retract my expressions. What I then said was not wild declamation, but measured truth. I repeat again, that no conduct was ever more profligate than that of the State of Pennsylvania. History cannot pattern it and let no deluded being imagine that they will ever repay a single farthing-their people have tasted of the dangerous luxury of dishonesty, and they will To any man of real philanthropy, never be brought back to the homely who receives pleasure from the im- rule of right. The money transactions provements of the world, the repudia- of the Americans are become a bytion of the public debts of America, word among the nations of Europe. and the shameless manner in which it In every grammar-school of the old has been talked of and done, is the world ad Græcas Calendas is transmost melancholy event which has hap-lated - the American dividends. pened during the existence of the I am no enemy to America. I loved present generation. Your Petitioner and admired honest America when she sincerely prays that the great and respected the laws of pounds, shillinge, good men still existing among you and pence; and I thought the United may, by teaching to the United States States the most magnificent picture of the deep disgrace they have incurred human happiness: I meddle now in in the whole world, restore them to these matters because I hate fraudmoral health, to that high position because I pity the misery it has occathey have lost, and which, for the sioned-because I mourn over the happiness of mankind, it is so impor-hatred it has excited against free institant they should ever maintain; for tutions.

the United States are now working Among the discussions to which the

moral lubricities of this insolvent people just now reached this country, this is have given birth, they have arrogated the picture of the finances of the into themselves the right of sitting in solvent States. Their debts may be judgment upon the property of their about 200 millions of dollars; at an creditors - of deciding who among interest of 6 per cent., this makes an them is rich, and who poor, and who annual charge of 12 millions of dolare proper objects of compassionate lars, which is little more than 1 per payment; but in the name of Mercury, cent. of their income in 1840, and the great god of thieves, did any man may be presumed to be less than 1 ever hear of debtors alleging the wealth per cent. of their present income; but of the lender as a reason for eluding if they were all to provide funds for the payment of the loan? Is the the punctual payment of interest, the Stock Exchange a place for the tables debt could readily be converted into a of the money-lenders; or is it a school | 4 or 5 per cent. stock, and the excess, of moralists, who may amerce the rich, converted into a sinking fund, would exalt the poor, and correct the in-discharge the debt in less than thirty equalities of fortune. Is Biddle an years. The debt of Pennsylvania,

instrument in the hand of Providence to exalt the humble, and send the rich empty away? Does American Providence work with such instruments as Biddle?

But the only good part of this bad morality is not acted upon. The rich are robbed, but the poor are not paid: they growl against the dividends of Dives, and don't lick the sores of Lazarus. They seize with loud acclamations on the money bags of Jones Loyd, Rothschild, and Baring, but they do not give back the pittance of the widow, and the bread of the child. Those knaves of the setting sun may call me rich, for I have a twentieth part of the income of the Archbishop of Canterbury; but the curate of the next parish is a wretched soul, bruised by adversity; and the three hundred pounds for his children, which it has taken his life to save, is eaten and drunken by the mean men of Pennsylvania - by men who are always talking of the virtue and honour of the United States-by men who soar above others in what they say, and sink below all nations in what they do who, after floating on the heaven of declamation, fall down to feed on the offal and garbage of the earth.

estimated at 40 millions of dollars, bears, at 5 per cent., an annual interest of 2 millions. The income of this State was, in 1840, 131 millions of dollars, and is probably at this time not less than 150 millions: a nett revenue of only 1 per cent. would produce the two millions required. So that the price of national character in Pennsylvania is 13 per cent. on the nett income; and if this market price of morals were established here, a gentleman of a thousand a year would deliberately and publicly submit to infamy for 15. per annum; and a poor man, who by laborious industry had saved one hundred a year, would incur general disgrace and opprobrium for thirty shillings by the year. There really should be lunatic asylums for nations as well as for individuals.

But they begin to feel all this: their tone is changed; they talk with bated breath and whispering apology, and allay with some cold drops of modesty their skipping spirit. They strutted into this miserable history, and begin to think of sneaking out.

And then the subdolous press of America contends that the English under similar circumstances would act with their own debt in the same manner; but there are many English Persons who are not in the secret constituencies where are thousands are inclined to consider the abomin-not worth a shilling, and no such idea able conduct of the repudiating States has been broached among them, nor to proceed from exhaustion "They has any petition to such effect been don't pay because they cannot pay; presented to the legislature. whereas, from estimates which have what if they did act in such a manner,

But

wou'd it be a conduct less wicked than I never forgive us for having preceded that of the Americans? Is there not them 300 years in civilisation. They one immutable law of justice is it are prepared to enter into the most not written in the book? Does it not bloody wars in England, not on acbeat in the heart? are the great count of Oregon, or boundaries, or guide-marks of life to be concealed right of search, but because our clothes by such nonsense as this? I deny the and carriages are better made, and fact on which the reasoning is founded; because Bond Street beats Broadway. and if the facts were true, the reason- Wise Webster does all he can to coning would be false. vince the people that these are not lawful causes of war; but wars, and long wars, they will one day or another produce; and this, perhaps, is the only advantage of repudiation. The Americans cannot gratify their avarice and ambition at once; they cannot cheat and conquer at the same time. The warlike power of every country depends on their Three per Cents. If Cæsar were to reappear upon earth, Wettenhall's list would be more important than his Commentaries; Rothschild would open and shut the temple of Janus; Thomas Baring, or Bates, would probably command the Tenth Legion, and the soldiers would march to battle with loud cries of Scrip and Omnium reduced, Consols, and Cæsar! Now, the Americans have cut themselves off from all resources of credit. Having been as dishonest as they can be, they are prevented from being as foolish as they wish to be. In the whole habitable globe they cannot borrow a guinea, and they cannot draw the sword because they have not money to buy it.

I never meet a Pennsylvanian at a London dinner without feeling a disposition to seize and divide him; to allot his beaver to one sufferer and his coat to another - to appropriate his pocket-handkerchief to the orphan, and to comfort the widow with his silver watch, Broadway rings, and the London Guide, which he always carries in his pockets. How such a man can set himself down at an English table without feeling that he owes two or three pounds to every man in company I am at a loss to conceive: he has no more right to eat with honest men than a leper has to eat with clean men. If he have a particle of honour in his composition he should shut himself up, and say, "I cannot mingle with you, I belong to a degraded people-I must hide myselfI am a plunderer from Pennsylvania." Figure to yourself a Pennsylvanian receiving foreigners in his own country, walking over the public works with them, and showing them Larcenous Lake, Swindling Swamp, Crafty Canal, and Rogues' Railway, If I were an American of any of the and other dishonest works. "This honest States, I would never rest till I swamp we gained (says the patriotic had compelled Pennsylvania to be as borrower) by the repudiated loan of honest as myself. The bad faith of 1828. Our canal robbery was in that State brings disgrace on all; just 1830; we pocketed your good people's as common snakes are killed because money for the railroad only last year." vipers are dangerous. I have a geneAll this may seem very smart to the ral feeling, that by that breed of men Americans; but if I had the misfor- I have been robbed and ruined, and I tune to be born among such a people, shudder and keep aloof. The pecuthe land of my fathers should not niary credit of every State is affected retain me a single moment after the by Pennsylvania. Ohio pays; but act of repudiation. I would appeal with such a bold bankruptcy before from my fathers to my forefathers. I their eyes how long will Ohio pay? would fly to Newgate for greater purity of thought, and seek in the prisons of England for better rules of life.

This new and vain people can

The truth is, that the eyes of all capitalists are averted from the United States. The finest commercial understandings will have nothing to do with them. Men rigidly just, who