But although
the aggregate result must be great, it by no means followed that it
need be at all large in its individual details.
[In conclusion, Mr. Dickens made a laughable comparison between the
paying off or purification of the national debt and the
purification of the River Thames.]
SPEECH: LONDON, JUNE 5, 1867.
[On the above date Mr. Dickens presided at the Ninth Anniversary
Festival of the Railway Benevolent Society, at Willis's Rooms, and
in proposing the toast of the evening, made the following speech.]
Although we have not yet left behind us by the distance of nearly
fifty years the time when one of the first literary authorities of
this country insisted upon the speed of the fastest railway train
that the Legisture might disastrously sanction being limited by Act
of Parliament to ten miles an hour, yet it does somehow happen that
this evening, and every evening, there are railway trains running
pretty smoothly to Ireland and to Scotland at the rate of fifty
miles an hour; much as it was objected in its time to vaccination,
that it must have a tendency to impart to human children something
of the nature of the cow, whereas I believe to this very time
vaccinated children are found to be as easily defined from calves
as they ever were, and certainly they have no cheapening influence
on the price of veal; much as it was objected that chloroform was a
contravention of the will of Providence, because it lessened
providentially-inflicted pain, which would be a reason for your not
rubbing your face if you had the tooth-ache, or not rubbing your
nose if it itched; so it was evidently predicted that the railway
system, even if anything so absurd could be productive of any
result, would infallibly throw half the nation out of employment;
whereas, you observe that the very cause and occasion of our coming
here together to-night is, apart from the various tributary
channels of occupation which it has opened out, that it has called
into existence a specially and directly employed population of
upwards of 200,000 persons.
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