military Powers of the Continent receded from the principles which nominally inspired the Treaties of 1815, that sooner or later we must have a war of ideas, or of nationalities, to use the phrase of the professors in the science of Revolutions made Easy. But at the present moment it is not a war of ideas which we are all looking forward to, as a not very improbable contingency; but a simple, straightforward war of ambition upon the good old principles which moved Louis XIV. to despatch Turenne into the Palatinate, or decided the First Napoleon to send Soult and Marmont into Spain. For the moment, indeed, these projects are wrapped up in the mystic verbiage of the Second Empire. The Sous-Prefêt of Thonon calls Louis Napoleon nothing less than the Apostle of European Emancipation.
Another of his acolytes styles him Aladdin, and tells us that his wonderful lamp is his perfect simplicity of character. Why not dub him Ali Baba at once, and explain to us that the phrase of “L’Empire c’est la paix” has been the “open sesame” by help of which he has marched from conquest to conquest? There is reason enough for anxiety in all this. There is a cloud bigger than a man’s hand upon the horizon. A sound understanding between England and France—one is sick of the term “entente cordiale”—was the surest guarantee for the peace of the world—and this no longer exists. This is a lamentable but a true conclusion, and therefore we cannot rejoice at the accounts we receive of the Imperial progress in Switzerland. Upon this point the Swiss themselves feel alarm, which is natural enough, and are under considerable apprehension that fresh names will soon be added to the list of achievements engraved upon the Alpen staff of this formidable excursionist. Louis Napoleon spent his youth in Switzerland, and in early manhood was an Italian carbonaro. It was in these two countries he must first have felt the impulses of ambition. What tenacity of purpose there is about the man!
THE HELMSHORE TRAGEDY.
It has been said that more persons are killed and injured in London, every year, by accidents resulting from the negligence or misfortune of drivers, than upon the various lines of railway in the kingdom, in consequence of collision, explosion, and the various chances of the iron way. The terrible business which occurred at Helmshore, near Manchester, on Monday, the 3rd of the present month, must have gone far to fetch up the averages against the railroads. Some 2500 pleasure-seekers had come to Manchester for the day, in order to assist at some festivity which was then in hand. They were hard-working artisans, such as we find in the manufacturing districts, and their families. All went well on the journey to Manchester. They had their day’s pleasure; it was to be the last, too, to many of their number. Well on in the night—it was about 11 p.m.—the excursionists flocked back to the station to be reconveyed to their respective homes. There were to be three trains choked full of passengers. One got away, and as it glided to its journey’s end in safety, we may dismiss it from our thoughts. The second train started—there were eighteen carriages full of people, a large proportion of them children. The night was very dark. Twenty minutes afterwards a third and similar train followed. Until the second train reached the Helmshore-station all went smoothly enough. They had glided up the incline which here is very steep. The train had been brought to a stand-still. The guard had just removed the breaks, and this was the death signal to ten human beings—to make no mention of thirty-eight persons who in a few moments were to be severely wounded and mutilated. The coupling between the third and fourth carriages broke. The engine remained with three carriages attached. For the remaining fifteen carriages in the train there was a jerk and a backward rebound, and then the fifteen carriages began to move slowly in the direction of Manchester. At this moment, the third train which had been despatched from Manchester was slowly passing up the incline freighted with hundreds of human beings—mainly children—as in the second train. The night, as we have said, was dark; the incline was steep; the scene of the tragedy, now imminent, was a cutting, and the cutting formed a curve. One train was gliding up, the other was gliding down. There were some twelve hundred persons on whom might the Lord have mercy—for when one minute only removed from death they could scarcely be nearer it than they were in the Helmshore cutting on that night of the 3rd of September—now just passed.
The carriages which had been released as described, moved back slowly enough for about four hundred yards—that is, something under a quarter of a mile—down the incline. The third train was ascending it, and upon the same set of rails, at the rate of something between ten and fifteen miles an hour. Some one at the station had detached the engine of the second train from the carriages, had moved it on another set of rails, and was proceeding back as quickly as he could in the direction of Manchester, so as to give warning to the driver of the third train. But it was too late! The third train was too near, and before the engine of the second train had reached the spot where the two trains were fated to come into collision, the collision had occurred. Then the screams and groans of the sufferers might have been heard. Ten persons were killed upon the spot, and others were lying about in almost every form and variety of suffering to which the human frame can be exposed. The limbs of some were broken; others had been wounded by the fragments and splinters of the shattered carriages; others were lying oppressed with great weights. It is needless to dwell upon this agonising scene—the mischief had been done. Nor is this the first time that such a calamity has occurred.
On the 23rd of August, 1858, a tragedy precisely similar happened between Worcester and Wolverhampton. Two trains full of excursionists were started with an interval of seventeen minutes between them. Then, as at Helmshore, the other day, the first train stopped at a station upon an incline. Then, as at Helmshore, the coupling between two of the carriages in the first train broke. Then eighteen carriages—as at Helmshore, fifteen—began to descend the incline, slowly at first, but