An alarming development, for those who travel by rail (and who does not?), is disclosed in several cases of signalmen having been found gambling and carrying on bookmakers’ businesses. Any one who, like the writer, has been in a railway collision, will vividly appreciate this. The crunch of the carriages, the awful succeeding moment between life and death, are among the ills that mortality is heir to in modern times, and are borne with more or less philosophy, to some extent perhaps depending upon the preventibility of the cause. But it will be well for railway directors, many of whom provide special facilities for the race-course gamesters all through the summer, to the inconvenience of the ordinary traffic, and wink at the gambling which goes on in their carriages however illegal, to draw the line at signal-boxes being made places under the Act and their signalmen being bookmakers. The conviction recently of a signalman for bookmaking at Knaresborough is by no means a solitary instance. In reporting to the Board of Trade on the North British Railway collision at Lochmill siding, Major Pringle states that just before it occurred there were five persons in the signal-box playing games. There are reasons to fear that there are bookmakers’ agents in many of the large railway stations, carrying on their regular nefarious business with the staffs, and affecting the comfort and safety of the public. As to the race-course ruffians, whose patronage is so carefully nursed, they have been known to descend from race trains and relieve refreshment rooms of the provisions without payment, so that it is now the practice in some places to clear them of their contents before the advent of these traffic-cherished caravans. There could be no greater mistake than to suppose that such cases as that of the clerk through whom the bookmakers robbed the Liverpool Bank of £170,000 (1901), or of the man who began life as a ready-money bookmaker, married into a titled family, was presented at Court, made a member of fashionable clubs, owned the best race-horse of the year, and ended his society career in his cross-examination in the High Court (1904), are exceptional beyond the fact of their striking notoriety. All sections of society are more or less corrupted by the gambling habits prevalent, and particularly by the professional betting system. It would be interesting to trace how many of the unhappy people figuring in the Divorce Court have been connected with the Turf.