472 
POPULAR SCIENCE EEYIEW. 
clearly tlie only alternative is to entrust the passengers with 
the power of signalling to the engine-driver to stop the train — 
who must then use his own discretion as to the earliest period 
at which this can be done with safety. To arrange for pas- 
sengers to signal to a guard possessed of no power of putting* 
himself in communication with them to ascertain what is the 
matter^ for the purpose of enabling him to signal to the 
engine-driver what is to be done_, would be palpably objectless 
and absurd. Those whose pohcy is obstruction_, have pretended 
to discover in the connection of the carriages by footboards_, 
or rather in the proposition that their servants should traverse 
the train by this rout^ something* so hazardous to their lives 
that they scruple to ask them to discharge so dangerous a 
d.uty. This tenderness of the safety of persons committed to 
our care is_, doubtless^ a most meritorious feelings but it is to 
be regretted_, in the present instance_, that it should be so 
engrossed with the safety of the one or two attendants on a 
train as to overlook that of the one or two hundred passengers. 
We venture to say that the simple expedient of a handrail^ 
at a height a little above the head^ running round the train^ 
on which a continuous hold- fast with one or the other hand 
should be maintained, would reduce the danger to a vanishing 
point, to a risk so infinitesimally small as hardly to admit 
of comparison with that which a seaman encounters in going 
aloft to reef topsails. 
Great stress has been laid upon the fact that a French Com- 
mission, appointed to inquire into the subject in consequence 
of the murder of a judge in a railway-train, expressed the 
opinion that, probably, the connection by footboards facili- 
tated the escape of the assassin, and hence that such an 
arrangement did not afibrd much security to passengers 
against attack. Truly, the connection of this vague opinion 
with an argument against continuous footboards as an adjunct 
to alarm signals is the reverse of obvious, and the attempt to 
make such an indefinite and inapplicable dictum do duty as 
an argument must be taken as an indication of the poverty of 
the case, bieither will the English public soon forget — seeing* 
it came so recently within the range of their own experience — 
that the absence of any connection between the carriages of 
a railway train neither prevents murder nor the facile escape 
of the assassin. 
There exists, then, no valid reason why we should not resort 
to continuous footboards as a means of enabling the assistance 
of the guard to be procured without entailing as a necessary 
consequence the stoppage of a train. At any rate, before 
discarding this resource, it is well we should recognize the fact 
that there is no alternative between entrusting to the discretion 
