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and we find that between the years 1851 and 1855, in one locality alone, no less than 2,893 miles of railway were commenced and completed. It may be quite true, as Colonel Kennedy informs us, that heavy gradients ought to be avoided, but surely where it comes to a question of providing a country, such as ours, with arteries of communication, and where it lies between these lines and no regular mode of transit at all, we should do well to imitate our Western brethren in their "go ahead" method of supplying themselves with "rough and ready cheap" lines, as, at all events, a basis for something more perfect and more perma

nent.

Some distinction requires to be made between the circumstances and local requirements of India and America, as respects both iron and wooden bridges. For the former, it would doubtless be necessary to import, as indeed is now done by the railway companies, the whole of the bridge work from England, as no dependence can be placed on native workmanship in India, where the work is to be exposed to great strains; and (par parenthèse) greater strength should be allowed in all designs than would be assigned in England, on account of the deterioration in strength iron undergoes in this country, according to recent experience; whether from the high temperature or the more rapid oxydation, is not yet clearly determined.

With regard to wood, however, the question may be at once determined; for large spans, wood is quite inapplicable in this climate, from the great hygometric changes between the hot seasons and the monsoons, which, though not of much consequence in small spans up to 40, or perhaps even 60 feet, would have a very prejudicial effect on a bridge of 190 feet span, and cause a considerable deflection at the centre of the trunes. Timber, however, is not plentiful in India as generally supposed, as an illustration of which the present high price of teak-timber in Bombay might be urged; and also the fact of most of our railways importing their sleepers, as the most ready method of procuring them in sufficient quantities within a given time. Cost of railways:

In America, according to Captain Galton, $10,000 to $12,000 per mile.

On the G. I. P. Railway, including rolling stock, £7,269, and a portion (20 miles) of double line.

The great delay in the first years of the G. I. P. Railway was in great measure caused by the necessity of examining the range of ghauts between the Tull and Bhore Ghauts, in order to ascer

tain exactly the best points for the ascents. Until these were determined, it was obviously impossible to go beyond Callian, as the precise direction of the lines could not be determined.

With the exception of the Tull Ghaut inclines, these will also be completed in about two years.

So far as steep gradients are concerned, those of the G. I. P. Railway vary up to 1 in 132 on the Sholapore line, and are much the same on the north-eastern extension. The Surat and Ahmedabad have better gradients, the ruling one being 1 in 500.

The heavy engines in use on the G. I. P. Railway are now scarcely equal to their work on the steeper parts of the line; the diminution of speed in ascending is distinctly perceptible, and in some cases the train has to back, to get a sufficient impetus to ascend the incline, as at the Tanna Viaduct and Callian Station on the down line.

Steep gradients require heavy engines, and heavy engines require heavy rails; there is consequently a limit beyond which economy, even in first construction, cannot be obtained.

The older engines in use in England averaged from 9 to 16 tons in weight.

The modern engines vary from 30 to 56* tons.

American engines weigh about 30 tons for steep inclines. We have omitted many of the most salient points in Captain. Galton's report, such as the centralised system of management pursued upon the New York and Erie Railway; the systematic use made of the electric telegraph as a provision against the inconveniences of single lines of rail; the construction of their engines, and various other interesting accessories. Many of these details are essential to a complete view of the cheap system which

*An engine of this weight proved so destructive to the permanent way that it was necessary to shelve it.

we are inclined to advocate for a newly-opened country, and we strongly recommend a perusal of the report itself. Our object is to call attention to a method which has proved so beneficial in the United States, and which seems far better calculated than our present course, to open out with rapidity the resources of this great empire.

ART. VI.-PROGRESSIVE WOMAN.

1. Lectures to Ladies on Practical Subjects. 2nd Edition. Macmillan & Co., Cambridge. 1856.

2. Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

NOTHING proves so clearly the healthiness of our generation, in nothing is it so superior to all preceding eras, as the pure idea it embodies of woman. Downwards from Chaucer, albeit the fashioner of one of the most perfect women idealised as Resignation, there has been, with two or three exceptions in the Elizabethan period, a current of impure thought and vulgar satire (sometimes from not vulgar men) allowed to flow about the name of the sex. But this has passed away. Passed away with this literary sin is a kindred literary folly. The Popeian sneer, feathered in all its elegance, is fossilised for ever in our language; but no one heeds it now, it is simply untrue. Chesterfield's opinion (so like Chesterfield and the "fine gentleman,") that women were" mere toys," went out with perukes and a belief in Voltairism. Both the Nobleman of Deportment and the Poet of Sneers, however, borrowed from that old Malthusian Hesiod, who thought her a "luxury only for the rich." Times are changed, and she is not now looked on as a toy, a luxury, nor thought of upholstery-wise. At no other time than that wherein exists the respect and admiration with which our periodical literature welcomes woman in any womanly sphere in which she excels, or in any sphere which she makes womanly, can we so truly deny that the age of chivalry is gone. The phrase is stereotyped,-we cannot help it. Looking beneath the chivalry of the dark ages, darker all the

And

more from the pure light it cast on them, we discern clearly enough that woman was never understood, was indeed what she is to this day in India, a purdah-woman, that is, concealed behind a curtain. Bodily and spiritually that has been her fate for centuries. Well might Rahel say, Chivalry "was a practical lie necessary to restore the equality of the sexes"; or call it rather, the manifestation of a certain ideal in the minds of a few noble men, upheld by a few noble women. Half the worship of the Madonna was towards a goddess of the worshipper's inner idolatry; his prayer was a craving that he might find such a living woman. he went on fighting, wandering, and performing many absurd things in both-according to his lights ;-beyond all was superstition, darkness, and weariness. Chivalry this certainly was in a manner, but it was neither Christian nor human. It seems to us, living in the age we do, that the true and effective age of chivalry is only being born, and that to a life the consummation whereof, beholders as we have been of progress in so many shapes making such gigantic strides, we cannot venture to form any notion; certain, however, that it shall be infinitely beyond any dreams of ours.

Apart from the great fact that the rudest of us, in all ages and circumstances, inherits from the love he has had for, and the memory he has of, a mother, somewhat of reverence for all women at all times ready to develope itself, there are two immediate causes of this reformation at home in the relative position of the sexes. These were the revulsion that very naturally followed, what may be called, the heartless school in literature, the school of Pope, itself a revulsion from the passionate and grossly sensual school of Congreve and Wycholey, and of the later of the old dramatists; and secondly, the intellectual assertion of several eminent women in grappling, not only effectually by pen, but by voice and hand, with questions of high art and of social bearing. Mary Woolstanecraft, Jameson, Somerville, the Brontze, Florence Nightingale, Fry, Norton, are names already more than classic, and dear to all lovers of intellectual and affectionate nobleness.

Combined with the efforts of these women are the exertions of such men as Maurice and Kingsley, and the other authors of Lectures to Ladies. No testimony could be higher, if it were needed, to the attention this subject is obtaining with our great minds. Yet it must be confessed that the brunt of the battle has been borne hitherto by women themselves; and to their own philanthropists and authors must we give the honour of raising them to the height noticed. And this, not so much by what they have written on their own sex, which on the whole is rather dull

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and weak, as, being women, they have for ever proved in their objective works their spiritual purity and capacity. Nevertheless, the social difficulties in the way of her continued elevation are formidable enough, as we shall endeavour to point out, though necessarily in a very fragmentary manner.

It is one of the necessary evils, resulting from a high state of civilisation with excessive population, that young men cannot marry till such time as they are enabled to support wives in the position in which they have been brought up. No caste prejudice in India is stronger than this in England. There are forty thousand young women in London alone, marriageable by age, health, and education-according to their class. In other words, the equivalents of the population of a second class town are more or less victims to this law of society. Poverty, and the allurements of dissipation on the part of the other sex, doom at least one-half of these to a life-long spinsterhood; to too many of them an unvirtuous one. It will be seen that one of the two causes just noted, is the result of the above law of society, and is not in fact its most disastrous one. A little courage on the part of the man would obviate this. Laws of society are but legal conventionalisms, and are not irremediable, since they proceed from hereditary notions liable at all times to be modified, and often, as is allowed by society itself, quite foreign and inappropriate to the subject matter. The average mind is ordinarily conservative. It receives with faith what the past bequeaths it. To it contemporary ideas are new-fangled and dangerous. That is why your great man must be bodily dead before he can spiritually live. Only when the brow, that burnt with regenerating thought, is cold and pale for ever, does the aureole of public applause grow round it. Let us dare to be true, let us think, and speak, and act in all honesty -always duly keeping in mind the bounds of decorum; let us turn full eyes on the world about us; there will then be no want of moral courage-at any rate of as much as will carry us through the ridicule and pity of the world, in marrying at such a period in our finances as will not enable us to live quite so idly, so luxuriously, as we did as bachelors and spinsters! Many and many a face has paled year by year, waiting for the happy time a thousand circumstances delay. To the young man able to support his wife in decency, we say, Be brave, life is not so very long that we can trifle with our own souls through half of it. Fight your way courageously on, and you will not be retarded