14 MAY 1842, Page 2

The week has brought us intelligence of three terrible accidents

in foreign lands, but in countries with which Englishmen are in habits of familiar sympathy. One of those events is so vast in its nature and consequences as to belong to the history of the world : Hamburg, queen of the free cities of Northern Europe, is almost half burnt down. Since the fire of London in the seventeenth century, the flames have never had such food. As in that case, too, the civic authorities seem to have been overwhelmed with the magnitude of the disaster—remedies waited upon the heels of calamity, instead of meeting its approach : men called on to act in emergency feared the responsibility of knocking down a few houses at first, because of the "sacrifice of property "; and the sacrifice of half the city and probably more than half its property—the fire, for instance, has consumed the capital of its insurance-offices--is a lesson on the caution which emulates recklessness in its con- sequences. As it was, having given the fire many hours' start, the worthy Senators had to follow it in its march with troops and cannon, in order to turn it at last, when it had desolated the city. Hamburg has been encamped without its own walls, burnt-out and ruined. Not the resort of the tourist, it is still a town familiar enough to English frequenters, men who engage in the trade of the world ; and the very fact that the English share the suffering will be an additional incitement to them to press forward to relieve it. A subscription has already been opened in London to aid the un- fortunate city.

Every railway-accident that has happened in England is eclipsed in horrors by that which destroyed crowds of holyday-makers at Versailles on Sunday last. A multitude were hastening back from a spectacle at Versailles to the gayeties of Paris, when one of the common railway-accidents stopped the train, and numbers were killed and wounded by the concussion. But to the ordinary horrors of a railway-collision a new one was added : several carriages caught fire from the outpoured furnaces of the engines, and many persons were burnt alive. The calamity seems to have arisen from the combination of three practices which, we believe, obtain on our own railroads,—two locomotive engines were used, and the foremost one was upset ; one of the engines employed had but four wheels ; and the passengers who fell a prey to the flames were locked in. What is the limit to which toleration of these visitations will go, before proper remedies of the preventive kind are imperatively de- manded?

An American steam-boat explosion makes up the list of disasters ; one of a common enough kind—a boiler burst in a race, but re- markable for the number of lives lost. With the remembrance of our own Sunning Hill slaughter of waggon-passengers, and with this wholesale destruction of passengers in France, we need no longer reproach the rougher race of the New World with showing con- tempt for human life and limb in the eager pursuit of gain : we are all alike.