In all the utilities of Railway travelling, England is supreme. Speed, represented by from thirty to sixty miles an hour, “just (to quote the words of Lubin Log) as the passenger pleases;” punctuality, that admits of the setting of watches by arrivals and departures; and safety, exemplified by the loss of no human life from any other cause than the carelessness of the sufferer, during the past two years, are proofs of British supremacy in locomotion. Yet—by a strange perversity not easily accounted for in a country known all over the rest of the world as the Kingdom of Comfort—the point apparently aimed at is to render the transit of the human frame as uncomfortable an operation as possible. Every elegance and luxury is bestowed upon waiting-rooms where extreme punctuality renders it unnecessary for people to wait; and upon refreshment-rooms in which travellers are allowed ten minutes to scald themselves with boiling coffee, or to choke themselves with impossible pork-pies; but carriages in which travellers have to be cramped up, often for hours, and sometimes for whole days, are apparently contrived to inflict as much torture as practicable. In order to force those who cannot afford it into the first-class, second and third-class carriages are only one and two degrees removed from cattle pens. And that these should not be too delicious, the humbler order of passengers will not easily forget that a director once proposed to hire a number of chimney-sweeps to render—what, with the best company, are nothing better than locomotive hutches—perfectly untenable. They manage these things better abroad. There a detestable class-feeling—a contemptible purse-worship, which rigidly separates people according to their pecuniary circumstances; which metes out the smallest privilege or comfort at a price—does not exist to prevent the managers of railways from making the journeys of their customers and supporters as pleasant as possible. On the French railroads, (setting aside the question that the fares are much lower,) the second-class carriages are comfortably cushioned, having pretty silk blinds to keep out the sun; windows that really are capable of being pulled up and down, besides hooks for hats,—a great convenience on a journey. For the blinds, indeed, an enterprising blind-maker in France agreed to furnish them to one railway company, gratis, on condition that they used no other for a certain number of years, and allowed him to make them the medium of his advertisements. Talk of advertising vans—can they be compared to the brilliant notion of advertising railways—trains of puffs, wafting the genius of inventors faster than the wind! We throw out the hint to the “advertising world” in this country.