In the early days of railway history lines were projected in all directions, regardless of the fact whether they would be of any use or not. Many of these lines began, where they ended, on paper. And now that the high-speed question has cropped up, we must not believe that every projected electric railway will be built, though of the ultimate prevalence of far higher speeds than we now enjoy there can be no doubt. The following is a time-table drawn up on the two-mile-per-minute basis. A man leaving London at 10 A.M. would reach-- Brighton 50 miles away, at 10.25 A.M. Portsmouth 60 " " 10.30 A.M. Birmingham 113 " " 10.57 A.M. Leeds 188 " " 11.34 A.M. Liverpool 202 " " 11.41 A.M. Holyhead 262 " " 12.11 P.M. Edinburgh 400 " " 1.20 P.M. Aberdeen 540 " " 2.30 P.M. What would become of the records established in the “Race to the North” and by American “fliers”? And what about continental travel? Assuming that the Channel Tunnel is built--perhaps a rather large assumption--Paris will be at our very doors. A commercial traveller will step into the lightning express at London, sleep for two hours and twenty-four minutes and wake, refreshed, to find the blue-smocked Paris porters bawling in his ear. Or even if we prefer to keep the “little silver streak” free from subterranean burrows, he will be able to catch the swift turbine steamers--of which more anon--at Dover, slip across to Calais in half-an-hour, and be at the French capital within four hours of quitting London. And if M. Romanoff’s standard be reached, the latest thing in hats despatched from Paris at noon may be worn in Regent Street before two o’clock. Such speeds would indeed produce a revolution in travelling comparable to the substitution of the steam locomotive for the stage coach. As has been pithily said, the effect of steam was to make the bulk of population travel, whereas they had never travelled before, but the effect of the electric railway will be to make those who travel travel much further and much oftener. SEA EXPRESSES. In the year 1836 the _Sirius_, a paddle-wheel vessel, crossed the Atlantic from Cork Harbour to New York in nineteen days. Contrast with the first steam-passage from the Old World to the New a return journey of the _Deutschland_, a North German liner, which in 1900 averaged over twenty-seven miles an hour between Sandy Hook and Plymouth, accomplishing the whole distance in the record time of five days seven hours thirty-eight minutes.