200 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ARE EXPLOSIONS IN COAL MINES PREVENTABLE? 



By FRANCIS R. CONDER, C. E. 



THE heaviest tax that can be imposed upon a nation is one that is 

 paid in human lives. From whatever point of view the subject 

 may be regarded, this conclusion is irresistible. If we look at it ac- 

 cording to purely economical considerations, we may obtain very 

 remarkable results. It has been estimated that an actual money cost 

 of 300 is incurred in raising a boy, cradled among the poorest classes, 

 from birth to manhood. It does not require us to ascend very high in 

 the social scale before we find that this estimate must be trebled. If 

 we take what we may call the cost price of the human unit at any 

 definite time, say at 500 on arriving at maturity, the producing power 

 of the unit in question will bear some relation to that sum ; the more 

 costly and careful education producing, as a rule, the more valuable 

 result, as to productive power. If the laborer who earns 14s. or 15s. a 

 week adds 50 per annum to the wealth of the country, the physician, 

 the scientific military or naval officer, the barrister, or the engineer, 

 may look forward to the time when his yearly labor will be worth 

 more than a hundred times that amount, even if appraised only by the 

 price he is actually paid for his time. Taking any producing indi- 

 vidual, whether valued at 50 or at 5,000 per annum, at any period 

 of his career, no income tax to which he can be subjected can approach 

 in its pressure the extravagant tax of death, For the payment of that 

 tax at once annihilates the total earning power of which there was, 

 until that moment, a fair mathematical expectation. 



The tax upon human life which is caused by war is one as to which 

 philosophers and philanthropists have long written, and as to which 

 generation after generation has complacently declared its own advance 

 on its barbarous ancestors ; although generation after generation has 

 too often seen increasing holocausts offered on the altar of battle, with 

 continually less and less excuse the word justification it is too often 

 but a mockery to use. We have seen, not so very long ago, that peace 

 has its death tax as well as war. And we wish to call attention to a 

 tax of this nature which, as far back as statistics have been collected, 

 appears to be paid in this country with a grim and appalling regu- 

 larity. 



Regularity, that is to say, when viewed in the light of statistical 

 returns. From any other point of view the deaths of which we speak 

 occur with the most frightful and unexpected caprice. There may be 

 a period of months during which none of the calamities which quietly 

 occur are brought under public notice. Then there may be a terrific 

 telegram, and an announcement in the largest letters used by the daily 

 press, " Frightful calamity at a coal mine sixty lives lost ! " Again, 



