KAILWAY ACCIDENTS. 



with another, the result will only amount to a difference in the 

 degree of the danger, or in the gravity of the catastrophe pro- 

 duced by an accident. So universal and so ancient is this 

 danger, that in the form of prayer ordained by the Church, 

 travellers by laud and water are included among the classes 

 more especially and emphatically entitled to the supplications of 

 the people. 



2. The progress of civilisation, the development of commerce, 

 the increase of population, and the discoveries of science, have 

 stimulated and increased personal locomotion on an immense 

 scale. The risk attendant upon it, and the character of the danger 

 incident to it, have varied with every change in the physical or 

 mechanical expedients by which this locomotion has been effected. 

 The spectacle exhibited on the occasion of some great railway 

 collisions would have been deemed by our forefathers too 

 extravagant even to be allowed a place in the wildest fictions. 

 Colossal vehicles, weighing several tons, shivered to pieces ; rods 

 of iron, thick and strong enough to sustain a vast building, bent, 

 twisted, and doubled up as though they were rods of wax ; 

 massive bars of metal snapped and broken like glass ; bodies of 

 the killed dispersed here and there, amongst the wrecks of 

 vehicles and machinery, so mangled as to render identification 

 impossible limbs, and even heads, severed from the trunks, 

 and scattered right arid left, so as to render it impossible to 

 re- combine the disjecta membra of the same body the coun- 

 tenances of the dead, where countenances remain at all, having 

 a ghastly expression of the mingled astonishment and horror 

 with which the sufferer was filled in the brief instants which 

 elapsed between the catastrophe and death ; the survivors, 

 maimed and wounded, lying under the ponderous ruins, groaning 

 in agony and supplicating for relief and extrication ! These are 

 incidents with which the vast improvements introduced by 

 science into the art of locomotion have unhappily rendered us 

 familiar, and which assuredly have had no parallel in the days 

 of waggons and stage-coaches, to say nothing of those of pack- 

 horses and saddle-bags. 



3. Are we thence to infer that the great mechanical inventions 

 which have signalised this age of ours, are attended with the 

 serious drawback of exposing us to greater risk and more 

 terrible dangers than any which were known in less advanced 

 and enlightened times ? Is the traveller at fifty miles an hour 

 by steam, on railway, in the nineteenth century, really exposed 

 to greater risks, and does he really need the prayers of the 

 Church more urgently than the wayfarer of the beginning of the 

 eighteenth 1 That disasters do occasionally occur, which were 

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