Accidents due to washouts, and to hidden defects in material are in the main unavoidable, though the former may sometimes be avoided by increased care and watchfulness during and after storms, and it is hoped that the latter may be materially reduced through the investigations now in progress in steel making.
Accidents due to imperfectly maintained track can be avoided by better maintenance, or by reducing speed to correspond to the conditions of the track. Speed and track conditions are inter-dependent factors.
Accidents due to jumping on or off trains in motion, and to trespassing, can be and should be eliminated by a rigid enforcement of existing laws, or the passage of new ones, if those on the statute books are found to be inadequate. As already stated, this would save one-half the annual deaths and a large proportion of the injured.
Substantially all of the casualties in coupling and uncoupling cars are due to carelessness of the men themselves, and the same may be said of most of those due to falling from or being struck by trains, locomotives or cars. It is difficult to suggest a remedy for this, or to formulate a course of procedure to reform the men in this respect. Recent and prospective legislation affecting the employers’ liability will not be conducive to increased carefulness, but will rather tend to foster carelessness.
Train accidents due to error, negligence or incompetence should be corrected by proper discipline. But the administration of discipline is restrained and obstructed by the brotherhoods, whose officers claim the right to be present at all investigations, and the discipline ordered must meet their approval. They contest suspension and dismissals by appeals to higher officers who have no personal knowledge of the men, and use every means at their command, even to threatening a strike, to prevent the order from being carried out, often with success, all of which is subversive of discipline.
It is not a comforting thought that, when you, here assembled, disperse to your homes, some of you may place your lives in the hands of a man who is retained in the service through intimidation, rather than fitness and merit.
There can be no remedy for this while unprincipled demagogues and politicians, catering for votes, continue to appeal to class prejudice, and while the sympathies of the people, public officials and arbitrators seem to be arrayed against the railways.
President White—We have now something else very interesting, and the next speaker will only keep you fifteen minutes. I now take pleasure in introducing Mr. A. B. Farquhar, of York, Pa., who will speak on “Vital Statistics and the Conservation of Human Life a National Concern.” He knows his subject; he knows it by experience; he has been through it; and he has met the classes, met the conditions he speaks of. He has a message to give you that is well worth hearing.
Address, “Vital Statistics and the Conservation of Human Life”
Mr. Farquhar—Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: Yes, I have been interested in this subject for perhaps seventy years of the seventy-five years of my life. I am very much interested in the work done in Pennsylvania. I shall refer to that, as is proper in a man sent as a delegate to this Congress by the Governor, and I believe it is a good example to other communities.