No. of Cases.Previous Occupations of the Paupers.Nature of Accident.Respective Ages.
18MinersHurt in mines21, 23, 27, 30, 34, 34, 40, 40, 43, 44, 47, 49, 50, 50, 51, 53, 60, 60.
2DittoBurnt in mines40, 60.
1LocksmithLamed by accident30.
1WheelwrightAccident by waggon69.
1Single womanLost her arm by accident.23.

On examining the individual cases of deaths that are classed as incident to the pursuit of the chief branches of mining or manufacturing industry, or in transport whether by land or water, it has always been satisfactory to find that for the future, by care, the greater proportion of them are preventible. In the case of the mining accidents, one part of them appear preventible by care of the superior managers of the mines—in arrangements over which the individual workman has no control; the other portion, by intelligence and care on the part of the workmen; and this last class of cases again reverts back to the power, and therefore to the means of imposing responsibility on the employers in the selection of educated and intelligent workmen—of habits of sobriety, and care to qualify them for works of danger. But at present they are, in a great measure, relieved from responsibility by the charge incurred by the want of care being thrown on other funds raised from persons who have as yet no practicable means of protection or prevention. When continued and dreadful losses of life take place, in the face of examples of successful prevention such as might be collected from every part of the country, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that if the branch of industry were charged with the pecuniary consequences of the losses assumed to be necessarily incident to it, generations would not be allowed to pass away in fear, recklessness, and misery without the early adoption of those means of prevention which self-interest would then stimulate. A frequent suggestion made upon the view of such casualties is that government inspectors should be appointed to inspect and direct and regulate machinery.

This subject was brought under consideration in the course of the proceedings of the Factory Commission of Inquiry, and it was then agreed that such a measure as that of inspection would only give an imperfect security, and would occasion vexatious interruptions, and that the least objectionable mode of interference, as well as the most efficient and just as a means of prevention, would be to charge a portion at least of the cost of such casualties upon the branch of industry. Subsequent observation, especially of the causes of pauperism, have strengthened my convictions of the soundness of the principle of prevention as stated in our Report, a passage from which I have submitted in the Appendix.[[31]]

In illustration of the pecuniary cost of disease, as shown in the cost of remedies in Scotland, there are several documents. The late Dr. Cowan, the professor of Forensic medicine at Glasgow, gives one in which he states—

“If any arguments were wanting to arouse the community to the investigation of this important subject, they might be drawn from the heavy pecuniary tax which fever entails on the benevolent of our city, from the poverty, misery, and crime which this disease engenders. It is not possible, from the data before me, to give anything like an accurate calculation of the sums spent for the treatment of fever in Glasgow during the last twenty years. The following calculation intentionally falls considerably under the amount, to prevent every suspicion of exaggeration:—

£.s.d.
1.Cost of the fever hospital8,56679
2.Temporary hospitals, and maintenance of patients in them5,00000
3.21,691 patients at 1l. 10s. treated at the expense of the infirmary32,536100
£46,102179
==========

To this amount fall to be added the expense of treating the poor in their own houses under the district surgeons of the burgh, and any sums expended by the heritors or the gorbals and barony parishes for similar purposes. But this sum must have been greatly increased by the demands of pauperism produced by fever, on our poor’s-rates, and on the private benevolence of our citizens; for the duration of the disease, and the period of convalescence which must elapse before an individual can resume his work will average rather more than six weeks, and when to this is added the difficulty of again finding immediate employment, we may safely assume that the 12,895 individuals treated in the fever hospitals during the last seven years, all, with few exceptions, depending on their daily labour and extending the benefit of that labour to others, were out of employment for a period of at least six weeks.”

The Rev. G. Lewis, the minister of St. David’s parish, Dundee, who has answered the queries issued by the Board, and very powerfully addressed the inhabitants on this subject, in the course of one of his addresses, observes that—

“Apart altogether from the waste of human life, and the indescribable suffering and sorrow which annually fall upon the working classes of Dundee from this periodical scourge, and viewed only as a mere matter of profit and loss to the mercantile and monied interest of Dundee, it were easy to demonstrate, that the expenditure of several thousand pounds per annum, in providing the means of cleanliness to this town, in the better cleansing of its streets, but, above all, of its back closes, courts, and lanes, and the clearing away of those pestilential masses of building which lie concealed from view behind the front lines of some of our principal streets, would have been rewarded by a saving to the community of a vast sum, which the ravages of disease and death have been, for the last few years, compelling Dundee to pay in a way its inhabitants think not of. That this may appear, I have brought into one table the number of cases of fever during the last seven years.

“Cases of Fever in Dundee during the last seven years, from 1833 to 1839, inclusive, calculated from the Bills of Mortality according to the proportion of nine cases to each death:—
Year.Cases.Deaths.
18331,188132
18341,521169
18351,179131
18362,673297
18371,881209
18381,773197
18391,593177
11,8081,312