EAILWAY COMMUNICATION. 
469 
moment to expect to burst upon tbem. Cases of insult and 
outrage to females from drunken or ill-disposed men are of 
frequent occurrence^ and it is difficult to conceive an instance 
of a narrower escape from loss of life or serious injury than one 
of these recently afforded. 
That passengers should be thus exposed to unnecessary 
danger and peril of life^ or bodily injury in travelling by rail- 
way, to say nothing of the alarm and apprehension which the 
knowledge of this insecurity begets in many, without any 
steps being taken by railway companies to remedy the evil, 
has very naturally excited the indignation of the public. For 
a long period there had existed a smouldering dissatisfaction 
on the subject, and at length, upon the murder of Mr. Briggs, 
this found vent in a loud and unanimous demand that active 
measures should at once be taken, if not voluntarily by the 
railway companies themselves — in which the public had little 
faith — then compulsorily in obedience to a Government order 
or legislative enactment. 
In short, public opinion and common sense have alike long 
ago decided that passengers on railways ought to be furnished 
with some means of communication with the guard, and recent 
occurrences have caused some provision of the kind to be 
called for more loudly than ever ; yet the railway companies 
show no intention or disposition to comply with the clearly 
expressed wishes of their customers. Unquestionably, how- 
ever, the will of the public ought to give the law in the 
matter, unless some very substantial ground can be shown 
for not complying with it ; for surely no one can have so good 
a right to determine the conditions and circumstances of 
locomotion as the travellers themselves. For a railway that 
carried only schoolboys we can understand its being pleaded 
as a reason for their demurring to acquiesce in the desires of 
their patrons, that they were no judges of what their own 
safety required,^^ the necessity of restricting the right of private 
judgment in childhood being universally recognized ; but to 
assign such a ground for setting at defiance the clearly 
expressed wish of the community at 
border on impertinence. 
Let us mow examine how and why it is that the wishes of 
the public have been and continue to be set at naught in this 
matter. Do there really exist sound grounds of ohjection, based 
either on difficulties in effecting the object, or on injurious conse- 
quences to be apprehended as a result ? We do not hesitate to 
answer this question most explicitly in the negative, and to 
affirm that the only lion in the path is the indisposition of 
railway boards and their officials — an indisposition made up 
half of professional jealousy and half of the dislike of dicta-; 
2 I 2 
large would manifestly 
