“Wal, stranger, that was a yarn. I guess I’ll go and have a smoke, and see if I can calkerlate what in blazes you did mean by all that long pow-wow.” And he departed.
“I think,” said the juror, “that the law ought to be the most stringent possible in order to put a stop to such barbarous and inhuman sacrifice of multitudes, such horrible mangling of bodies and limbs, such frightful cases of burning alive and scalding to death that have occurred so frequently of late.”
“Yes, I hope that the day is not very far distant when all our courts will hold, that all who undertake the transportation of passengers by the dangerous element of steam, and with the great speed of railway trains, are responsible for the use of every precaution which any known skill or experience has yet been able to devise, and that passengers need not judge for themselves how many of these precautions it is safe to forego.”[499]
“But,” urged another, “people now-a-days wish cheap and rapid travelling in all directions and everywhere.”
“Suppose they do; we do not allow monomaniacs or brigands to commit suicide or murder without interference, because it is their pleasure or their interest to do so; and I see no good reason why railway passengers or railway managers should be allowed to roast a hecatomb in human sacrifice, because it seems desirable or convenient to the one or the other class concerned in the immolation, or because the one class demands and the other consents, to use a mode of transportation which inevitably produces these results.”[500]
“Ah,” said a lady, “I fear these dreadful accidents will continue until every train is compelled to carry a director of the company, or a general manager, upon the cow-catcher; experience will then soon induce them to be a little more careful of the bodies and lives of others.”
“But, sir!” said the scientific gentleman, a precise man of figures, “I fear you exaggerate when you speak of hecatombs of sacrifices. I believe that in proportion to the numbers carried the accidents to passengers in the good old days of stage-coaches were, as compared with these days of railway dispensation, about as sixty to one. Reliable statistics in France prove this. Figures, which you know are proverbial for their truth, show that absolutely more travellers were yearly killed and injured, without fault of theirs, fifty years ago on stage-coaches, than are now killed on the cars. According to the Report of the Board of Trade of Great Britain and Ireland, out of all the 480,000,000 of journeys taken by passengers by rail in the British Isles in 1874, only 212 people were killed, and 1,990 injured not fatally; so that you can easily see only one solitary traveller was killed to every 2,274,881 who followed in the triumphant train of the iron horse, and only one injured to every 242,301 passengers.”
“You speak only of passengers,” said a listener. “I presume far more employees were killed during that time.”
“Certainly. Only 212 passengers were killed that year while as many as 788 employees were; and of the injured ones 1,990 paid for the privilege, while 2,815 were paid for running the risk: and of these mangled ones many had only themselves to blame. Sir John Hawkshaw, an authority on these matters, recently asserted that railway accidents were fewer now than ever: that in fact, on an average, a man might travel 100,000 miles each year for forty years, and the chances would be slightly in favor of his not receiving the smallest scratch, unless he ran into danger of his own accord.”
“You might almost as well at once assert that it is less dangerous to travel by rail than to stay at home,” I remarked.