556 



THE POPULAR SCIE^^CE MONTHLY. 



of Mr. Morgan's labored argument rests 

 in nubihus : it is very fine, from the 

 special pleader's point of view, but we 

 get no practical results from it. 



We have spoken of this article as a 

 note of reaction, and so, most emphati- 

 cally, it is. The progress made in mod- 

 ern times has consisted very largely in 

 the banishing from our thoughts and 

 calculations of all faith in occult agen- 

 cies, and in the establishment of the 

 habit of tracing everything that happens 

 to some intelligible, if not always con- 

 trollable, cause. So long as sprites, gob- 

 lins, and imps were seriously believed 

 to interfere in human affairs, so long it 

 was impossible to hold men to a strict 

 responsibility for their actions ; and 

 •whcQ things went amiss, no truly scien- 

 tific inquiry jnto the causes of the mis- 

 chance was ever instituted. To say 

 that it was "the act of God" was the 

 easiest way out of the difficulty, and 

 the most satisfactory, certainly, to those 

 upon whom the blame might properly 

 have fallen. But science has been teach- 

 ing mankind to search out real causes, 

 and to dismiss purely imaginary ones ; 

 and just as the disposition to do this 

 has developed, and just as men have 

 been taught that they can not put all 

 their sins of omission and of commission 

 on the shoulders of invisible agencies, 

 Lave accidents and irregularities of all 

 kinds diminished in number. Mr. Mor- 

 gan admits this. lie says that, up to a 

 very recent date, courts of justice ha- 

 bitually saved time and routine labor 

 by assuming accidents, the causes of 

 which could easily have been arrived 

 at, to be "acts of God." lie tells us 

 that, in a very recent case, while the 

 principle involved in the expression, 

 " the act of God," was recognized by 

 the court, it was held that a shipwreck, 

 in order " to be a veritable act of God, 

 must have occurred in extremely bad 

 weather." Wo should rather have sup- 

 posed that the " act of God," if recog- 

 nizable at nil, Avould have been recog- 

 nized in the foundering of a ship in 



calm weather. It was the thunder-clap 

 that ho hoard from a clear sky that so 

 strongly alTected, for a brief period, the 

 not ordinarily very devout mind of the 

 poet Horace ; and Mr. Morgan seems so 

 far to agree with that "sparing wor- 

 shiper of the gods " as to hold that in 

 the case of railway accidents the "act 

 of God" is most visible, not when the 

 conditions are unfavorable, but when, 

 on the contrary, they are highly favor- 

 able, save in the one point in which a 

 quasi-supernatural interference is ex- 

 emplified. 



Admit the principle in question at 

 all, however, and we are back in the 

 dark ages ; we cease, indeed, to be fit to 

 run railways. It is one thing to bow 

 with resignation to a calamity after it 

 has happened, and quite another to an- 

 ticipate that calamities will result from 

 the "act of God," and so far make pro- 

 vision for them beforehand. How is 

 the " act of God " to be checked ? How 

 are we to prescribe the frequency with 

 which such acts are to be performed? 

 If, in the presence of such acts, we 

 really find ourselves outside of the 

 bounds of human responsibility, why 

 try, by any human means, to guard 

 against their recurrence ? We venture 

 to say, however, that no railway acci- 

 dent ever occurred that was not fol- 

 lowed by more or less strict inquisi- 

 tion into its cause, and that did not 

 give rise to measures intended to pre- 

 vent the same thing happening again 

 in the same way. Some of tiie facts 

 mentioned by Mr. Morgan himself tend 

 to show how little need there is to have 

 recourse to divine intervention to ex- 

 plain the occurrence of any class of 

 railway accidents. He tells us that un- 

 til within a very few months the strides 

 made by science " seemed to have hap- 

 pily abolished — in the United States — 

 the great railroad disasters of the past." 

 Fifteen or twenty years ago there were 

 a number of frightful accidents, but 

 since that time accidents involving great 

 loss of life have been very infrequent. 



