Yet considering the immense amount of persons carried, the numbers killed or wounded is small as compared with the numbers of those who are sufferers from accidents to which we are all liable all over the kingdom. Taking the metropolis only, there were 375 persons killed in the year 1862, of whom 171 came to sudden death within city limits, the remainder being the casualties of this description for all the other parts of London.[66] If we refer to the Wreck Register of the Board of Trade, for 1866, we will see that, whilst the number of wrecks and casualties to ships[67] from all causes, on or near the coasts of the United Kingdom was 1,860 (just 251 more than the average of shipwrecks for the last five years, and 322 more than the average for ten years), the number of the lives lost was 896.[68] It is estimated that 500,000 persons navigate the ships both foreign going and coasting, in which these lives were lost. Their number would have, beyond all doubt, been greatly added to, but for noble efforts that have been established, as well as increased within very recent years, for saving life from shipwreck. During the last year and the first-half of 1867, no less than 1,600 lives have been saved by means of the 153 boats of the National Life Boat Association. A large number of lives has also been saved by the rocket apparatus which is furnished to the Coast Guard by the Board of Trade, out of the Mercantile Marine Fund.
In 1864 there was one life lost for every 109,715 tons of coal raised in British collieries. In that proportion there would have been 903 persons killed in collieries in 1866.
Accidents by fire are awfully numerous, and no class or rank of life is exempt from them, but they are naturally more numerous among the children of the humbler classes than in the superior stations of life. From the nature of female dress, the sex is not only more exposed to these accidents than men are, and the consequences are less fatal to males than they are to females. Fire-escapes have been a means, under Divine Providence, of saving many lives from destruction in houses on fire.[69]
Distressing and harassing as railway and other accidents are in this country, their number and frequency in the United States are utterly appalling. Of accidents to American railway trains in 1866, there were 82, by which 115 persons were killed and 607 were wounded. “This,” says the writer from whom the foregoing information is derived, “is an improvement over 1865, when there were 183 railroad accidents, killing 335 persons outright, and wounding 1,427 others.” It appears also that 1866 exhibits a better report in this respect than any year since 1861, but it must not be forgotten that in American accidents “persons wounded” means only those who were not “killed outright” at the time of an accident. The great hulk of the wounded die subsequently, and should in reality be included among the killed. Persons who only suffer from minor wounds and injuries are not reported. It is only in England that the slightest injuries are reported and are included in the general account of persons injured. There were 23 steam-boat disasters on the various rivers and inland waters of the United States during 1866, by which 633 persons were killed and 156 wounded. In 1865, by 32 such accidents, 1,788 persons were killed and 265 were injured; but in 1865 a larger number of persons were killed in this way than in any previous year since 1854. What the numbers were in 1854 the writer who imparts the foregoing information does not mention; but he adds:—“These figures do not include any loss of life by disasters on the ocean.” As, until the outbreak of the war of 1862, the mercantile marine of the United States was equal to that of the United Kingdom, we may conclude, even making allowance for its recent diminution, that there must have been more lives lost on the sea than on the lakes, because American-built ships have always been notoriously less solidly built than British, and because the United States does not possess life-boats and other means of saving life such as we happily have in such abundance in this country.
We conclude this chapter by repeating the painful admission that railway accidents are inevitable. It must, however, be added, as an act of justice to railway officials, that their efforts are never-ceasing to prevent them. But, after all, how feeble and powerless is poor humanity!
CHAPTER VII.
HORSES AND ENGINES—CREWE.
The locomotive is like the horse. The latter, with long thin legs and slight frame—at least made so by training—is the race horse. His pace for a length of not more than a mile and a half is at the rate of 25 to 31 miles an hour. The Derby race of 1867 was run by Hermit, the winner, at the rate of 31·4 miles an hour. It was won in three seconds less time, or at the rate of nearly thirty-two miles an hour, in 1866. Since the Derby, Hermit has been “nowhere” in all his races. A first-class hunter will go cross country occasionally at the rate of about twenty miles an hour. A first-class “roadster,” with a weight suitable for his strength, will do fifteen miles, and maintain the pace for an hour. In the latter days of the old mail coach, the four horses galloped nearly the whole of seven miles in about thirty-two minutes, but, as contractors used to say, ” the pace was killing.” On one occasion there was a race between two coaches from Maidstone to London; the distance—from Maidstone to the Bricklayers’ Arms, Dover Road, thirty-six miles—was accomplished by the winner in two hours and three-quarters. Perhaps there is no better road in all England to run a coach race upon—it is undulating slightly all the way; whereas a completely level road is fatiguing to horses. A fast gig-horse, with light weight behind him, will go twelve miles in an hour, and can maintain that pace for at least an hour; but there are many horses in England that, having only to draw “a sulky”—that is, a vehicle for but one person—would easily accomplish fourteen and a half miles in an hour, and some are able to go fifteen. The old posters of former days could go eleven miles at the ordinary scale of pay for the post-boy. Properly “tipped,” he would get over the ground at the rate of twelve, or even thirteen, miles an hour. The Gretna Green pace was fifteen, and sometimes, for the last mile or two, nearly twenty; the object being to distance an enraged father, and to get within the toll-bar, closed against the pursuer at the instant the pursued had passed it. Put at this pace there was ever a risk of converting a marriage-feast into what Mr. Punch tells us all Scotchmen, with eye to main chance, prefer to all other meals—“a gude, mautter-of-fact funeral brickfeast, wie plenty of the whisky aut it.”