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IT may be doubted whether there is in England any class of men which, as a class, has produced greater results and attracted less attention than the navvies. Some of my readers will doubt, perhaps, whether I am justified in speaking of them as a class distinct in any sense from the working class in general. Others, on the other hand, may, I fear, have learnt to think of them as not only excluded from any recognised class of men, but as hardly belonging to the race of man at all. My chief objects in this and subsequent papers will be—first, to claim for my navvy friends a place, and a very respectable place, in the genus homo, and next, to show that I am justified in speaking of them as forming a distinct species of working men—a species, too, of more than common interest, one that has been formed in our own time by a process of natural selection, the survival of the fittest; one that appears to have become more distinct and better defined since its first development. It is also one that may justly complain of neglect, although claiming, and ready amply to reward, the attention of the student in human nature, of the philanthropist, and above all, of the Christian and the evangelist. There are some points of resemblance ​between the navvies as a class and the gipsies, of whom we have lately heard so much. But in any comparison of the two the gipsy must, I think, yield to the navvy on the score of interest and of merit. They are alike in that both differ widely in their haunts and habits from their fellow-men. Each may be regarded as a distinct species, but the gipsy forms a foreign, the navvy a native species. The species gipsy is ancient, effete, and dying out; the species navvy is young, vigorous, and still developing. The gipsy is chiefly interesting in romance, and notable for his preference for a dishonest to an honest mode of life; the navvy for the sterling worth, reality, and honesty of his work. One reason, no doubt, why the navvy has attracted so little attention is that he is generally to be found and his work is most frequently done in out-of-the-way places, far from the busy haunts of men. Fifty years ago the railway began its mighty march in England, the pioneer of an advanced civilisation, but the navvy has been the pioneer of every railway that we have. And as now we pass in rapid travel from end to end of England over the smooth and level iron road, each embankment, every cutting, every tunnel, bridge, and viaduct, yes, every foot of road bears witness to the hard and patient toil of many a thousand navvy hands. The navvies have been everywhere before us, and have passed on out of sight; they have no doubt sadly scratched and disfigured the face of their country, but how fruitful have their scratches been. They have left, alas! in many places whither they came sad memories of the ill they did, ill we think that for the most part would never have been done had it not been forgotten by those who sent them that their navvy servants had human hearts and immortal souls as ​well as broad backs and sinewy arms. Besides the construction of railways there is another class of works on which navvies have of late years been very largely employed—the making, namely, of reservoirs for the water supply of large towns; especially in the north of England with its many densely populated centres of industry is this the case. The natural water supply—the stream flowing from the distant moor, pure and limpid till it reaches the first large village or town upon its banks—is fouled by dyes and sewerage and abominations of every kind, and flows on to be rendered ever more and more foul by every town it passes till it reaches the sea. Meanwhile the dwellers in the towns must seek elsewhere for the supply of pure water, so essential to their life, and often they are driven far-a-field in their search. Perhaps they find at last some distant moorland stream still undefiled, and flowing, probably, down some remote valley innocent of coal, unexplored by any railway, and possessing only a thinly-scattered agricultural population. An Act of Parliament gives them the right to take thence the water that they need. But before they can take it they must store it up in a reservoir, or perhaps, in several reservoirs, constructed on the course of the stream one above another.

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