helplessness itself in the thousandth case when the calamity arrives in other words, the disaster, when it comes, will be found to consist in the operation of some perfectly familiar law of nature (as of gravitation or inertia), set in motion by the simple oversight of some trained and trustworthy subordinate; which would have resulted from identical causes thirty centuries ago to the most primitive of conveyances equally as well as to our own limited expresses, with their air-brakes, vestibules and couplerbuffers.

In examination of the history of railway accidents in the United States, the physical conformation of the country should not be overlooked. As railways were first constructed among us, and had their formative days of operation, in the Eastern States rather than among the flat lands and ordinarily easy grades of the Ohio valley, it was only natural that the bulk of experiment, mismanagement, error, and fatality, should have been expended on our Atlantic slopes. The period of the railway in the United States

To-day, the maps

is yet one very insignificant in point of years. of our territory of greatest railway development have Lake Michigan and the Mississippi, instead of the Atlantic Ocean, for their east. But by the time that railway construction had begun to extend westwardly from those boundaries, those greatest insurances of safety-the air-brake, the coupler-buffer, the steel-rail, the improved means of communication between the engineer, conductor, and his crew, which had been slowly wrought out in the East-had come into practical use. Hence it is that the Pacific railroads, though spanning gorges, climbing summits, and surmounting problems of construction to which the achievements of our Atlantic slope railroads are moderate, have no such records of manslaughter and destruction as we find in the records of Eastern rail-transportation. At present every American railway is equipped-is obliged by law to be equipped-with the last improvement in safety-insuring devices, not only for the convenience of the passenger, but for the safety of the employé against his employer as well as against fellow-employé. And it is an amenity to the credit of the railway system (which ought not to be lost

upon

sight of in these days when wage-workers are taught to look anything incorporated as their deadliest foe) that it has introduced into the common law of the land the principle that an employer's duty to his employé is only discharged by furnishing him the safest tools for his work which the strides of science have devised.

For a long period of years, these strides of science seemed to have happily abolished-in the United States-the great railroad disasters of the past. Since the frightful catastrophe at Carr's Rock on the Erie Railway of twenty years ago, science and experience have rendered the giddy curves and bold escarpments of its Delaware division as safe as the tangents crossing an Iowa prairie. The Angola and Ashtabula terrors on the Lake Shore Railway wound up practically the list for that line; while, had it not been for a phenomenal piece of silly and unaccountable carelessness at Spuyten Duyvel (when Mr. Wagner, an inventor of parlor-car conveniences, was crushed to death in one of his own coaches), the New York Central wonld have closed up its own perspective of great calamities at New Hamburgh, something in the neighborhood of fifteen years ago, six or seven years later than Carr's Rock. But this fifteen years of succeeding and wonderful immunity from great railway-disaster-most wonderful when we consider that it corresponds with an era of railway-building in the United States unparalleled in the history of human industry— was brought to a termination by a rapid succession of calamities, grouped into a period of ten months of the year 1887, which, in point of loss of human lives (and no other point is worth considering), were, if not the most terrible in railway annals, yet fall little in horror below the Wigan slaughter, or the annihilation at Tay Bridge, of the multiple horrors of which (analogous to those of shipwreck and railwreck combined) no living tongue shall ever tell the story. These five occurred during the first ten months of that year, (1) on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad at Republic, Jan. 4, 1887; (2) on the Central Vermont Railroad at White River, Vt., Feb. 11; (3) on the Boston and Providence Railroad at Forest Hills, March 14; (4) on the Toledo, Peoria, and Western

Railroad at Chatsworth, Aug. 10; and (5) at Kout's Station on the Chicago and Atlantic Railway, Sept. 12 of the present year. These being remarkable not only as breaking the long immunity, but as illustrating (what has come to be a truth in the relations of the railway to the people, viz.:) that most accidents are occasioned by lapses, not of the company, but of representatives of that very class from which criticisms upon railway companies and managements is always found to spring - I think warrant examination here. It will, I think, be found that they were each and all due, not to any defect of machinery, signals, or other mechanical appliances which the corporation could have supplied, or to any defective or careless management, but to those unaccountable omissions of trained minor servants to perform a perfunctory detail of their routine work-a detail which it was their second nature to perform—which it would have ordinarily required a physical effort for them not to perform, or to have kept them from performing; that is to say (for it is difficult to exactly formulate it in words), an instantaneous mental incapacity on the part of a trained workman or care-taker, over which laws, rules and incorporations have no control, and against the possibility of which neither hope of reward nor fear of loss or punishments can afford any defense or protection whatever. They all occurred on perfectly equipped roads, and from the simplest natural causes. Each of the accidents might have happened to the rudest contrivance of primeval or prehistoric man, to the cart which used the section of a tree-trunk for a central wheel, or to the hollowed tree-trunk which itself formed a means of watertransportation—as will appear from their recapitulation.

The Republic accident was in this wise: a freight-train, which had ample time to make a run of some dozen miles to get out of the way of a through express coming in an opposite direction, which had made that run easily every night for years, for once failed to accomplish it. All the mechanical appliances and motive power of the train were in perfect order; its crew were old servants of the company. But the weather was exceptionally cold, the water in the tank of the engines was all but congealed, and the

crew of the freight-train found themselves encroaching on the time of the express. Here was not only no novel situation, but, on the contrary, perhaps the simplest which can occur in any railway management. There was no emergency to meet. Probably not an hour passes in a day but that, somewhere in the vast railroad operations of the country, the case is paralleled. But here at Republic, on the night of the fourth day of January, 1887, the hand sent ahead with the signal failed to carry it: two trains met. The old catch problem of the irresistible force meeting the immovable body demonstrated itself; namely, the trains were destroyed, and twenty human beings lost their lives.

Just a month later, Feb. 5, came the disaster at White River. A night express thundered upon a bridge, which was supposed to be properly inspected. Every mechanical portion of the train was working as it should; every servant of the company was at his post; nevertheless, the locomotive left the rails instead of following them; the express-train was plunged to the frozen surface of the river fifty feet below; and, of its three hundred passengers, thirtytwo never breathed again, or were roasted in slow agony from burning debris upon a floor of ice. Every bridge on every railroadline in the nation is ordered to be watched. A corporation must act by its agents. This bridge had probably been hourly inspected for years, but somebody had failed to inspect it on the fifth day of February, 1887. Another month went by, and on the morning of the 14th of March a packed train on the Boston and Providence Railroad of three hundred mechanics and working-women was moved into Boston for the day's business. Somebody had failed to report or to discover a flaw in the iron-work of a bridge at a point called Forest Hills. The locomotive followed the rails. Everything upon the train was in perfect order; no appliance in the company's power to provide was lacking; but the bridge sank. The entire train except two rear cars was piled up in kindling-wood in a defile made by a passing road below; and from the undistinguished mass forty persons were drawn out dead. Four months of absence of great calamity by rail was then to succeed. But on the evening of the 10th of August an excursion party, gathered at

Peoria and other points in Illinois, was to be carried to Niagara Falls. There were sixteen cars loaded with excursionists, and two engines were needed to draw them. The ordinary rules were observed, and due notice of the extra movements of such an unusual train was duly wired ahead for the guidance of watchmen and track-walkers. All went regularly; but it seems that a side-fire had been kindled on the right of way for clearing-up purposes, and that some track-walker whose duty it was to watch it had allowed it to communicate to the beams of the wooden bridge at or near Chatsworth. The train reached the bridge, but the bridge was already disabled by fire. It sank as did the one at Forest Hills, and eighty-five passengers were killed,-a most unprecedented deathlist for an American railway accident. Compared to the above, the fifth of these fast-recurring disasters seems almost dwarfed, and yet it was the most wonderful-from the standpoint of our present examination-of all. An engine drawing an express passenger-train on the Chicago and Atlantic Railway became disabled by the breaking of an eccentric strap. The engineer hauled up at a water-tank for repairs. A freight-train which followed, relying upon the schedule which the first train should ordinarily make, ran into the rear of the train with the disabled engine. Nine persons only were killed,—a small list compared with those we have previously noted. But doubtless it is as terrible to the victim to be killed in a list of nine as in a list of eighty. It was the story of the Republic disaster over again. Some brain had failed to do the regular act which it had performed for years as regularly as clockwork.

Now here, in less than nine months, one hundred and eigthy-six lives, all precious to their owners if to nobody else, are sacrificed. Nobody but the claim agents of the corporations can ever know the number of wounded and maimed (nor even they, since many of those who escape do not care to press their undoubted claims), and the stockholders of the unfortunate corporation do not care to advertise the dead loss of material, or what it costs in cash to replace its ruined rolling-stock and transported material, lest the newspapers of the country dilate upon the preference shown for income