oloured
people to 59,000,000 of white people, but it is a sad fact, as stated in
the _Times_ of March 7th last, that a Government return, dated June
1st, 1890, showed that there were 45,233 convicts in the prisons of the
United States, and that of this number no less than 14,687, or one-third
were coloured people, and that out of these coloured people only 237
were Chinese, 3 Japanese, and 180 Indians, so that 14,267 were negroes.
As the whites, counting all the States, are eight times as numerous as
the coloured people, and yet the coloured convicts are one-third of the
whole, it speaks badly for the morals of the negro race in America.

I was much struck with the immense development of electricity. Steamers,
railway carriages, tramcars, hotels, shops, towns, villages, and railway
stations, even those in remote places, with scarcely a building near to
them, were all well lighted by electricity.

Railways run on scaffoldings down the centre of the streets, and horses
with their vehicles run underneath them. The railway trains are well
heated throughout by hot water pipes (every class), and reflect a grave
reproach on our country, where, in the severest weather, it is difficult
to get a foot warmer, except by certain main line trains, and, even
then, one is expected to "tip" the attendant. Poor persons travelling in
thin garments and poorly fed, in severe weather, scarcely ever dare to
ask for a foot warmer unless they are prepared to fee someone, and,
whether rich or poor, no one can get a foot warmer at any of our country
stations. When we consider that railways originated in this country, and
that some of the parts of America I passed through were, some 50, some
40, and some even 30 years ago, only known to the trapper and the
Indian, it shows the increase of enterprise exhibited by our cousins
over the Atlantic.

Tramcars are worked by electricity, by steam, by horses and mules, and
by revolving endless cables. Telephones are everywhere. The railway
journeys in America often occupying several days, the tickets are a kind
of succession of coupons, parts of which have to be given up at various
stages. Caution is exercised in selling railway tickets for long
journeys--thus, you are required to sign the ticket, and observations
are made of you, such as your height, probable age, colour of your eyes,
hair, etc. Some of the lines of railway are not fenced in, not even in
towns, so that the train runs through a town as op