ample, inspectors of the first class, in the third year of service as inspectors, get 35 shillings a week. Guards in the highest class get as much as 25 shillings. First-class porters get 22 shillings, ranging down to 14, and signal-men get from 17 to 19. Yet the organization has great stability and we seldom hear of strikes. To explain these facts several elements must be taken into account. Low wages are merely relative after all, and the cost of comfortable living in England is much less than it is here. Then, permanence of place and the chance for promotion count for much, and we find that in our own country the best roads, on which the conditions are most secure, get the pick of the men at the same or even lower wages. But in the English system still another element enters; that is, the provision for the care of the men. Taking, for example, the Great Eastern: there is a provident society, established 43 years ago, to provide a fund for the relief of its members in sickness, and pensions in old age or in case of accident, and allowance in case of death of a member, and funeral expenses should his wife die. Males between 16 and 35 years of age, employed by the company, may be elected members of this society, which is managed by an elected committee. Monthly meetings of the committee are held, for which travelling expenses are allowed, and members of the committee who do not attend the meetings are subject to fine. The president, vicepresident, and trustees of the society are the superior officers of the railroad company, the chairman of the board being the president. The members pay a small weekly contribution, amounting at the most to 10d., and in case of sickness they get free medical attendance and medicines, a maximum weekly allowance of 16 shillings, and a small payment to the family in case of death. The maximum pension is but 6 shillings and 10d. a week, which of course is a very small, but substantial help to a poor man. Provisions are made for retiring from the society and withdrawing a reasonable sum for payments made. Then there is an accident fund, which applies to officers as well as servants of the company the victims of accidents in discharge of their duty. This carries with it not only a weekly allowance but a certain life insurance. To this fund the company contributes an amount equal to one-half of the amount paid in by the members, and a further sum of £30 on the death from accident of any one of the insured. There is also a pension fund, applying to servants only; that is, to those receiving weekly wages, and not to members of the salaried staff. To this also the company contributes each year a sum equal to the aggregate contributions of the members, and agrees to contribute not less than £1,000 in any half year. The superannuation fund dates from 1878, and this provides for pensions for salaried officers; then, finally, there is a supplemental old-age relief fund, established very recently for the assistance of servants between 55 and 65 years of age. In the year 1893 the Great Eastern Company contributed to these various funds over £27,000. The London and North Western has several funds of a similar character. The superannuation fund has been in existence over 40 years. This applies only to salaried officers and clerks. Membership in this is a condition of entering the service, but no person older than 26 is allowed to enter. Members contribute 22 per cent. of their salaries, and the company contributes an equal amount. An insurance society was organized 23 years ago to provide for what are called members of the wages staff, which is for all grades below the salaried staff, and to this the company contributes a sum equal to five-sixths of the premiums paid by the employees. The provident and pension society was established 20 years ago to provide weekly allowance in case of ordinary sickness for employees in the wages staff. Then there is a pension fund, established 10 years ago, for the same men, to provide a retiring pension for members after they reach 65, or for such members as, having reached the age of 60, are no longer able to continue at work. The engine-drivers and firemen, because of the special danger of their occupation, are excluded from all these benefits, and consequently special societies have been organized to take care of them. I do not understand that all of the English railroads make such provision for the care of their employees, but similar societies exist on some of the other railroads. Before dismissing, finally, the topic of the personnel of the English railroads, we may properly glance at the attitude of the directors and superior officers toward the financial interests of the owners of the properties which they control and toward the interests of shippers and other users of the railroads. The most competent authorities agree that English rates are stable and uniform; that every shipper may know what other shippers pay, and that he can tell what he will have to pay a week or a month from now; and most authorities agree, even the shippers themselves, that uniform and stable rates are more important to all interests than low rates. Furthermore, English railroads have for years been free from those scandals which so often come up in the management of American railroads, to the mortification of all patriotic citizens and to the immense injury of our credit. What is the reason for the better management in these respects of the English railroads? Is it legal or is it moral? To a certain degree it is legal, but to a far greater degree moral. One very important legal provision is that found in the Act of 1845, under which no director may hold office of trust or profit under the company, or be interested in contracts with the company. This provision as to contracts seems to be construed in England to mean what it says, and we do not hear of railroad directors there making contracts with themselves; but, unfortunately, in the United States flagrant instances of this nefarious practice have been common through our whole railroad history, and have been revealed within the last year. Another valuable legal influence is found in the Arbitration Act of 1859, under which questions as to agreements between railroad companies may be submitted to arbitrators and the decision of the arbitrator enforced in the courts. If a company re fuses to arbitrate, the Board of Trade may appoint an arbitrator, and the decision is still enforceable at law. Thus railroad agreements get a legal standing, which is a powerful influence in preventing the brigandage of which we sometimes hear in this country. But back of this, and far more potent than any laws could be, is the spirit of the inen in control. This is marked by great practical sagacity and a high sense of their duty as trustees. They make agreements to keep them. For an English railroad officer to break his word is dishonorable; for him to "work the market" is infamous. Not long ago an American railroad president, when asked if he would sign a rate agreement, said, "Yes, I don't mind; I have already signed it 27 times." He knew the chances were a hundred to one that it would be broken in a week. The Englishmen, on the other hand, take it as a matter of course that agreements should stand, and have provided an admirable machinery for making rates and adjusting the numerous matters in which they must work together. The Railway Clearing-house is an institution of the land. It has endured for years, and since 1850 has been regulated by act of Parliament. Through this institution pass all receipts from traffic worked over parts of two or more lines, and all settlements are made, not by the companies directly, but by the employees of the Clearing-house, which is controlled by a committee of delegates from the companies. This committee meets regularly four times a year, or oftener if necessary, and in case of differences with respect to accounts its decision is conclusive and is enforceable in court. The functions of the Clearing-house have gradually enlarged until they cover pretty nearly all the ground on which the railroads touch each other. At the Clearinghouse various conferences meet, which arrange rates for the use of cars, classifications of freight, terminal allowances, regulations of speed and signalling of trains, and numerous other matters. It is partly true, as is often said, that it is much easier for the English railroads to work together through such an institution as their Clearing-house than it would be for American railroads, because the number of men, the number of miles, and the amount of latitude and longitude involved are so immensely less. On the other hand, we must admit that the railroad business of England is large enough to furnish a pretty fair sample of what can be done, inasmuch as the English railroads carry 1 times as many passengers as we do and about half as much freight. We all know the danger of comparisons, and yet I venture to suggest, with such delicacy as I can, that the management of the English railroads on the whole is characterized by better faith in their relations with each other and in their relations with those who use railroads, and by a higher sense of honor in their relations toward those who actually own the railroads, than are the railroads of the United States; and I say this with the most profound respect for the ability and integrity and high sense of honor and duty of the great majority of the superior officers of the railroads of our own country. The trouble is that the few individuals who lack these qualities are permitted to work enormous injury to the reputations of the great mass of honorable men and to the properties which they administer. It would take us too far to attempt to account for the fact that the English railroad officers hold each other more strictly to their obligations than do our own; it would involve digging too deep for the roots of things. But I venture to suggest that the large share taken in the affairs of English railroads by men whose fortunes were made several generations ago, and whose grandfathers were honored by the nation, accounts in considerable measure for the standard of conduct in these affairs. The men who have nothing to lose are kept in check by the men who have honorable names at stake. I think I see the power of the smart adventurer waning, slowly it is true, but surely, in our own railroads. The rise of the professional spirit among the officers, and the growth of the sense of trusteeship among the directors, are killing off the brigands faster, I believe, than most people think. It was part of the plan of these articles to say something of the control exercised by the Government over the railroads of the United Kingdom; but the topic is not a simple one, and the editor warns me that space and the patience of the reader have limits. I shall further tax them only to say that of all the great nations of the earth the Englishmen and the Americans have had the most freedom in building and working their railroads. We have had more freedom than the English; they have had more than any one else. And no other peoples approach England and the United States in the quality and amount of service that they get from their railroads. Nowhere else can money buy such luxury; nowhere else are the masses moved with such speed, comfort, and frequency of trains. In no other country of the earth can the shipper of freight get such combinations of speed, rates, and facilities. The railroad systems of the United States and the United Kingdom are splendid examples of what an ingenious. and energetic race can do when the Government keeps its hands off. M. DESCHAMPS has a remarkable position in one respect. Of all French artists known to me he is the most adequately and completely represented in the public galleries of France-I mean in what are called the "musées," both of Paris and the provincial towns. This gives him a good chance of passing down to posterity, as his most important works are seldom hidden away in those private collections which a French artist, in my hearing, once compared to un enterrement de première classe. An American travelling in France may first become acquainted with the work of Louis Deschamps in the Luxembourg, and after that as he wanders through the country he will find him again at Marseilles, Avignon, St. Étienne, Rochefort, Mulhouse, Carcassonne, and other places. This artist was born at Montélimar in 1848, and has ever since retained a strong attachment to his native place, where he has a residence still, and where he regularly passes half the year, and that the hottest, for his Provençal temperament enjoys the glow and glare of the south. He is entirely southern, speaking French with the Provençal accent, which differs as much from that of Paris as the tones of a Scotchman do from those of a Londoner, and it may be suspected that if professional reasons had not brought him to the banks See Frontispiece. of the Seine and kept him there for a few months of every year, he would never have got farther north than the junction of the Saône and Rhone at Lyons. I need not add that he has never visited a certain island, situated in the fogs and mists of the remote Atlantic Ocean, where five millions of people live in one smoky city on the banks of a muddy river. All his affections are concentrated on that land of bright sunshine, blue skies, and castled heights where the strong winds whiten the clear swift waters of the Rhone. Certainly it is a glorious land, and the wonder is small that a native who is an artist besides should love it, but the art of M. Deschamps does not go far to confirm M. Taine's well-known theory of the influence exercised by an artist's surroundings on his technical production. The pictures by M. Deschamps are, as a rule, very far from being bright and sunny. In his decorative work alone is there a certain brightness and gayety of color, the easel pictures are almost always gloomy and sad in coloring, and they are often inspired by a profoundly melancholy sentiment. The artist's success with the public has been due, in great measure, to his sympathy with all kinds of suffering and privation. It may be doubted whether there is another artist living, in any country, who has more strongly the sentiment of compassion. I am fully aware that in many literary and artistic natures this sentiment is merely dramatic; I mean that it does not touch the genuine feelings of the artist; it is, I will not say affected, but sincerely imagined without enlisting personal feeling at all. In poetry a kind of art very closely approximating to that of M. Deschamps is to be found in "Les Pauvres Gens" of Victor Hugo. I remember hearing a famous Parisian actress recite that very touching piece before a private audience in a drawing-room, and with such pathos that we were all very deeply affected and many of us in tears. I then asked her if she herself felt anything, and she answered, "Nothing whatever; my recital is only art, my personal feelings are not engaged in it in any way, I am absolutely unmoved." Now, this is assuredly not the case with M. Deschamps; his sympathy with misfortune, poverty, privation is a real sympathy; I know that by his way of talking about the subjects of his pictures. For example, as he was describing the poor blind girl who is the subject of the picture entitled "Pitié" he spoke of the few poor advantages as well as the disadvantages of her lot; she had been born blind, he said, she had never known any other state, and she lived in a condition of remoteness from many human interests and anxieties that accompany a more complete existence. Her nature was tranquil and calm, a strange resignation seemed natural and easy to her, and as the painter talked in this way of the subject of his picture, the pale and motionless figure on the canvas seemed endowed with the degree and kind of life that had belonged to its original. So with the livelier and more painful picture entitled "Cold and Hunger," a girl begging in bitter weather, her fingers almost frozen and want in her pale face and tearful eyes. She was a real sufferer in the artist's conception or recollection, and not simply a model acting a part. A picture now in the gallery at Carcassonne, represents a scene that M. Deschamps once saw on a spring morning, hence its title “ Vu un Jour de Printemps," but the work has no relation to the beauty of the season; it is not a landscape-painter's spring. We are in a poor garret lighted by a small high window through which we see nothing but a glimpse of sky; on the floor is a sheet where a corpse has been lying, but it is now taken away, and three young orphans remain in the desolate chamber with no other company than a crucifix. 66 The first picture by M. Deschamps that attracted general attention was his 'Fille-Mère," exhibited in 1883, a title best translated into English, I suppose, by "The Unmarried Mother." Her dead child is in its cradle, and she is looking into vacancy with an expression of utter desolation. This is assuredly not a cheerful subject; nevertheless, it is less painful than "The Mad Girl" ("La Folle"), in the Rochelle Gallery, first exhibited in 1886. Another subject, exquisitely sad yet full of consolation in its sadness, was "The Death of Mirèio," a picture in illustration of the twelfth canto of Mistral's famous and assuredly immortal poem, when the dying girl has the illusion of crossing to the shores of Paradise in a bark on the blue sea and treats death itself as a deception. Noun, more pas! Iéu, d'un pèd proumte Sus la barqueto deja mounte Adiéu, adiéu! Deja nous emplanan sus mar! La mar, bello plano esmougudo, Car la bluiour de l'estendudo Tout à l'entour se toco emé lou toumple amar. Ai! ... coume l'aigo nous tintourlo! De tant d'astre qu'amount penjourlo, N'en trouvarai bèn un, mounte dous cor ami Libramen poscon s'ama! E Es uno ourgueno, alin, que canto? E souspirè l'angounisanto, Santo revessè lou front, coume pèr s'endourmi. I turn these stanzas into English blank verse, as it allows a translator to follow his original much more closely than he can in rhyme. However, I must lose the sweet southern music of the Provençal, that mingles Italian, Spanish, and French sounds in a wonderful composite harmony. "This is not death! Upon the splendid plain Borders all round the deep and bitter gulf. |