They say they do not have accidents on these French roads, and I think it must be true.  If I remember rightly, we passed high above wagon roads or through tunnels under them, but never crossed them on their own level.  About every quarter of a mile, it seemed to me, a man came out and held up a club till the train went by, to signify that everything was safe ahead.  Switches were changed a mile in advance by pulling a wire rope that passed along the ground by the rail, from station to station.  Signals for the day and signals for the night gave constant and timely notice of the position of switches.

No, they have no railroad accidents to speak of in France.  But why?  Because when one occurs, somebody has to hang for it!  Not hang, maybe, but be punished at least with such vigor of emphasis as to make negligence a thing to be shuddered at by railroad officials for many a day thereafter.  “No blame attached to the officers”—­that lying and disaster-breeding verdict so common to our softhearted juries is seldom rendered in France.  If the trouble occurred in the conductor’s department, that officer must suffer if his subordinate cannot be proven guilty; if in the engineer’s department and the case be similar, the engineer must answer.

The Old Travelers—­those delightful parrots who have “been here before” and know more about the country than Louis Napoleon knows now or ever will know—­tell us these things, and we believe them because they are pleasant things to believe and because they are plausible and savor of the rigid subjection to law and order which we behold about us everywhere.

But we love the Old Travelers.  We love to hear them prate and drivel and lie.  We can tell them the moment we see them.  They always throw out a few feelers; they never cast themselves adrift till they have sounded every individual and know that he has not traveled.  Then they open their throttle valves, and how they do brag, and sneer, and swell, and soar, and blaspheme the sacred name of Truth!  Their central idea, their grand aim, is to subjugate you, keep you down, make you feel insignificant and humble in the blaze of their cosmopolitan glory!  They will not let you know anything.  They sneer at your most inoffensive suggestions; they laugh unfeelingly at your treasured dreams of foreign lands; they brand the statements of your traveled aunts and uncles as the stupidest absurdities; they deride your most trusted authors and demolish the fair images they have set up for your willing worship with the pitiless ferocity of the fanatic iconoclast!  But still I love the Old Travelers.  I love them for their witless platitudes, for their supernatural ability to bore, for their delightful asinine vanity, for their luxuriant fertility of imagination, for their startling, their brilliant, their overwhelming mendacity!