| Battle of Bull Run, 1861 | ||
| Killed | Wounded | |
| Federals | 470 | 1,071 |
| Confederates | 387 | 1,582 |
| Total | 857 | 2,653 |
| Pennsylvania Coal Mines, 1901 | ||
| Killed | Wounded | |
| Anthracite | 513 | 1,243 |
| Bituminous | 301 | 656 |
| Total | 814 | 1,899 |
When we pass from the record of particular industries to the general casualty record we are met by a mass of unintelligible figures. Bulletin No. 83 gives the rate of fatal accidents in the cities wherein registration is required as 100.3 in each 100,000 of population. For the whole registration record the rate is 96.3. On a basis of 80,000,000 population this would mean a yearly loss of from 77,040 to 80,240 lives. Mr. Frederick L. Hoffman, of the Prudential Insurance Company, in a letter printed in Mr. Robert Hunter’s recent volume, “Poverty,” estimates the rate as between 80 and 85 per 100,000. This would mean from 64,000 to 68,000 killings. “If we say that twenty-five are injured to every one killed, and consider ... the fatal accident rate to be 80 in every 100,000, we have it that 1,664,000 persons are annually killed or more or less seriously injured in the United States. If all minor accidents were taken into consideration, it is probable that the ratio of non-fatal accidents to fatal accidents would be nearly 100 to 1.” This would mean approximately 4,800,000 minor woundings every year.
We cannot separate, on the basis of present figures, the fatal accidents which would be inevitable under any form of society and those which are consequent upon the present capitalist system of production, with its brutal indifference to life. We can only estimate. We have, for instance, in the census reports, an entry of “burns and scalds,” but nothing about boiler explosions; we have a certain number of deaths from drowning, but we are not told whether they occurred in frightful disasters like mine floods or the destruction of a General Slocum—for which capitalist industry is solely responsible—or in accidents wherein the individual’s whim or caprice alone was responsible. And finally we have an appalling record of suicides; but in how many of these business troubles or other economic causes were the impelling motives for self-destruction we cannot tell.
What we do know is that the overwhelming number of the fatalities that all of us learn of, instance by instance, are due to economic causes; that railroad, factory and mining accidents are for the most part needless, and due almost entirely to the brutal indifference of capital to the lives of the workers, and that far the greater number of suicides of which we read or hear are of beings who have been sent to death through economic troubles. Under the benign reign of capitalist industry we have a yearly list of fatalities somewhere between 64,000 and 80,240 and of serious maimings of 1,600,000, whereas two great armies, employing all the enginery of warfare, could succeed in slaughtering only 62,112 human beings yearly.
It is time we heard less of the butchery of war; time we heard more of the butchery of peace. And yet it is doubtful if we shall hear a different strain from those now most prominently before the public as advocates of peace. The advocacy of peace, in so far as it emanates from the retainers and other beneficiaries of the capitalist class, is based not so much upon humanitarian grounds as upon the ground that the worker is serving a more useful purpose when mangled in the Holy War of Trade than when slaughtered in armed conflict. It is the waste of profits on human labor, rather than the waste of life, that most deeply affects them. They are not always conscious of this, because they instinctively identify their moral notions with the material interests of the class they serve. But an unconscious or subconscious motive may be the most powerful of impulses to speech and action. And thus there is every reason to believe that we shall continue to hear the horrors of war most loudly denounced by the very ones who keep most silent regarding the horrors of industrial “peace.”
It is curious how fond men grow of each other when they are making money together.