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Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XX, Issue 3876, 19 March 1877, Page 2

The free passages on the colonial railways, granted by the members of the Legislature to themselves last session, have no doubt been a great convenience to many of them whose business vocations render it necessary for them to do a good deal of travelling. The non-existence of nighttrains, however, has prevented the railway carriages being availed of as they are by the negro legislators of South Carolina, namely, as sleeping apartments. The; Charleston correspondent of The Timqs writes, under date December 29, 1876 : — "I have already described pretty fully the South Carolina 'House of Commons ;' but one fact is sometimes worth more than pages of description. Let me briefly relate what seems to me such a fact, with the grounds on which 1 believe it to be true. It is the custom here for the State legislators to receive free passes for the State railways. Whether the pass is altogether a free offering or one of the various forms of Parliamentary blackmail to which, according to the Democratic view, public companies in South Carolina must be prepared to submit, I cannot say, nor does it affect the point I am illustrating. Suffice it that all the M.P.'s have free passes, and, though I had seen enough of the local Parliament to have no very profound respect left for its members, I -was almost as much amazed aa my readers can be to be told that some of the M.P.'s, who cannot, or will not, go to the expense of lodgings when discharging their Parliamentary duties during the session, take advantage of the free passes to turn the trains into bedrooms, and habitually spend their nights in them. The pass does not, of course, include the sleepingcars, for which an extra charge is made, so they sleep, as they best can, on the ordinary seats, which in America are too short for a man properly to stretch himself, and console themselves, it may be, for their discomfort by the reflection that they also get their light and firing gratis. The pass, iv fact, gives them a lodging with this most unusual advantage over most lodgings, that there are positively no extras. How the legislators manage about their toilette and change of linen had better, perhaps, be left to the imagination."