THE CONDUCTOR.
THE CONDUCTOR.
A recent case in the courts of this county, has set me to thinking of some of the wrongs heaped upon railroad men so much, that I shall devote this article exclusively to a review of the opprobrium bestowed upon all men connected with railroads, by the people who every day travel under their control, with their lives subject to the care and watchfulness of these men, for whose abuse they leave no opportunity to escape. Does a train run off the track, and thereby mischief be worked, every possible circumstance that can be twisted and distorted into a shape such as to throw the blame upon the men connected with the road, is so twisted and distorted. The probability of any accident happening without its being directly caused by the scarcely less than criminal negligence of some of the railroad men, is always scouted by the discerning public; most of whom scarcely know the difference between a locomotive and a pumping engine. An accident caused by the breaking of a portion of the machinery of a locomotive engine on the Hudson River Railroad, which did no damage except to cause a three hours' detention, was by some enterprising and intelligent (?) penny-a-liner dignified into a proof of the general incompetency of railroad men, in one of our prominent literary periodicals, and the question was very sagely asked why the railroad company did not have engines that would not break down, or engineers that would not allow them so to do? The question might, with equal propriety, be asked, why did not nature form trees, the timber of which would not rot? Or, why did not nature make rivers that would not overflow?
Let two suits be brought in almost any of our courts, each with circumstances of the same aggravation, say for assault and battery, and let the parties in one be ordinary citizens, and in the other, let one party be a railroad man and the other a citizen, with whom, for some cause, the railroad man has had a difficulty, and you will invariably see the railroad man's case decided against him, and in the other case the defendant be acquitted, to go scot-free. Why is this? Simply, I think, because every individual who has ever suffered from the hands of any railroad employee, treasures up that indignity, and lays it to the account of every other railroad man he meets, making the class suffer in his estimation, because one of them treated him in a crusty manner.
If a man's neighbor or friend offend him, he tries to forgive it—earnestly endeavors to find palliating circumstances; but, in the case of railroad men, all that would palliate the offense of rudeness and want of courtesy, such as is sometimes shown, is studiously ignored, or, at the mildest, forgotten.