November i8, 1887.] 



SCIENCE 



243 



moved into Boston for the day's business. Somebody had failed to 

 report or to discover a flaw in the iron-wori< of a bridge at a point 

 ■called Forest Hills. The locomotive followed the rails. Every 

 thing upon the train was in perfect order ; no appliance in the 

 company's power to provide was lacking; but the bridge sank. 

 The entire train except two rear cars was piled up in kindling-wood 

 in a defile made by a passing road below ; and from the undistin- 

 guished mass forty persons were drawn out dead. Four months of 

 absence of great calamity by rail was then to succeed. But on the 

 evening of the loth of August an excursion party, gathered at 

 Peoria and other points in Illinois, was to be carried to Niagara 

 Falls. There were sixteen cars loaded with excursionists, and two 

 •engines were needed to draw them. The ordinary rules were ob- 

 served, and due notice of the extra movements of such an unusual 

 train was duly wired ahead for the guidance of watchmen and 

 track-walkers. All went regularly ; but it seems that a side-fire 

 had been kindled on the right of way for clearing-up purposes, and 

 that some track-walker whose duty it was to watch it had allowed 

 it to communicate to the beams of the wooden bridge at or near 

 Chatsworth. The train reached the bridge, but the bridge was al- 

 ready disabled by fire. It sank as did the one at Forest Hills, and 

 ■eighty-five passengers were killed, — a most unprecedented death- 

 list for an American railway-accident. Compared to the above, 

 the fifth of these fast-recurring disasters seems almost dwarfed, 

 and yet it was the most wonderful — from the standpoint of our 

 present examination — of all. An engine drawing an express pas- 

 senger-train on the Chicago and Atlantic Railway became disabled 

 by the breaking of an eccentric strap. The engineer hauled up at 

 a water-tank for repairs. A freight-train which followed, relying 

 upon the schedule which the first train should ordinarily make, ran 

 into the rear of the train with the disabled engine. Nine persons 

 •only were killed, — a small list compared with those we have pre- 

 viously noted. But doubtless it is as terrible to the victim to be 

 killed in a list of nine as in a list of eighty. It was the story of the 

 Republic disaster over again. Some brain had failed to do the 

 regular act which it had performed for years as regularly as clock- 

 work. 



Now here, in less than nine months, one hundred and eighty-six 

 lives, all precious to their owners if to nobody else, are sacrificed. 

 Nobody but the claim agents of the corporations can ever know 

 the number of wounded and maimed (nor even they, since many of 

 those who escape do not care to press their undoubted claims), and 

 the stockholders of the unfortunate corporation do not care to ad- 

 vertise the dead loss of material which it costs in cash to replace 

 its ruined rolling-stock and transported material, lest the news- 

 papers of the country dilate upon the preference shown for income 

 over flesh and blood, and lash the popular dislike of corporations 

 into fury with the stereotype with which every railway-accident fills 

 our admirable press. But allowing four to one, — a minimum al- 

 lowance, — nearly eight hundred more human beings have suffered 

 a loss of limb or extreme physical p?an, and several hundred thou- 

 sands of dollars' worth of direct expenses incurred, for every one of 

 these accidents, which should never, in the ordinary course of 

 human procedure, have happened at all. 



I say, should never have happened ; but where shall the respon- 

 sibility be placed ? By law it is placed, and rightly, so far as human 

 laws go, upon the railway-companies. But every railway-officer 

 knows that the penalty his company suffers for such accidents as 

 the five above described is exemplary, — a vindication only, so far 

 as the companies themselves are concerned. That they have done, 

 were doing at the time the accident happened, all that experience 

 and science had taught them how to do, or that their professional 

 or expert brethren employed in the same industry could have done 

 under like circumstances, they know, and every railroad-man in the 

 ■country knows, perfectly well. But the railway-official also knows 

 very well, however, and realizes very submissively, that for these 

 accidents he will be held to answer, and not before a jury of experts, 

 or of his peers. The newspapers in no one of the above instances 

 fail to ascribe these accidents to the ' greed of corporations.' The 

 'greed of corporations,' to be sure, is only another name for the 

 duty of every corporation to pay dividends, if they can ; and doubt- 

 less, were there no such duty or no such chance of payment, there 

 would be no railroads, from the simple disinclination of ordinary 



mortals to invest money in costly enterprises without hope of 

 return or increment. But waiving that consideration, certainly it is 

 hedging on the superfluous and the elementary to say that no rail- 

 way-company courts accidents ; that, no matter how large any in- 

 dividual loss by reason of the casualty may be, the company (that is 

 to say, its stockholders collectively) must be the largest losers of all. 

 When Sir James Coke said that corporations had no souls, he did 

 not utter an epigram : he simply stated a fact. A corporation has 

 no sentiments : it is simply put together for business purposes, be- 

 cause a number of individuals see in association the means of in- 

 vesting in a lawful industry too heavy for any one of them to singly 

 handle. An attempt to earn dividends is properly described as 

 ' greed,' of course. But what reader of newspaper denunciation 

 pauses to subtract from any particular year's ' greed,' of any particu- 

 lar corporation, the million of dollars or less that a great disaster 

 like that at Chatsworth or Forest Hills draws out of a company's 

 treasury ? Whatever the present state of clamor against corpora- 

 tions may develop, it is at least apparent, from considerations of 

 pure 'greed,' that a railway-corporation is not a Moloch, or a con- 

 trivance incorporated for the purpose of burning or mutilating 

 human beings, or crushing their bones, or mangling their limbs. 

 Philares is said to have built a hollow bronze ox in which to roast 

 his subjects for fun, and the druids to have made wicker cages in 

 which to burn as many living babies as possible for economy's sake. 

 But bronze oxen and wicker cages are comparatively inexpensive, 

 and there were no courts handy in which damages could be recov- 

 ered by the survivors. Locomotive engines and Pullman coaches 

 are, however, rather costly receptacles in which to holocaust pas- 

 sengers. In spite of newspaper declamation, is it not self-evident 

 that no railway-company gloats over the ruin caused by an accident 

 upon its line } 



To return to the five accidents above mentioned. In not one of 

 them does it appear from the reports to the company — the news- 

 paper accounts, or even the findings of the local coroner's jury (a 

 class of valuable material which is not apt to be over complimen- 

 tary to the railway-company) — that any of the mechanical agen- 

 cies — operating-gear, engines, couplings, air-brakes, signals, wheels 

 of the trains wrecked — were old, superannuated, or in bad repair ; 

 that the track was in bad condition ; or that ordinary wear and 

 tear had been allowed to remain unmet or exceeded. The utmost 

 that can be said was, that, out of some three millions of men em- 

 ployed in the service of the railway-companies of the United States, 

 five seem, for some utterly unaccountable reason, to have each failed 

 in his duty of a moment, and that that moment in which he failed 

 happened in the course of chance to be the supreme and crucial 

 moment respectively in the Uves of some two hundred human beings. 

 It is too late in the day to call these failures, perhaps, ' Acts of 

 God,' but what else are they } They are not the fault of the com- 

 pany. The company has no control over the minds of their ser- 

 vants. It could, indeed, negatively control their minds by so over- 

 working them that nature refused longer to perform its functions. 

 And for the safety of the community we think the law ought to take 

 cognizance of a company which overworked its employees, and hold 

 it to the same responsibility in that case as in cases where the com- 

 pany furnished dangerous conveyances to its patrons, or old, worn, 

 and imperfect machinery to its servants. But in the five cases 

 above selected there is no such allegation. The men sent out to 

 warn an appr.oaching train at Republic and at Kout's Station for 

 once omitted their routine duty. The track-walker at Chatsworth 

 forgot the bonfire kindled on the right of way. The bridge-in- 

 spector at White River and at Forest Hills failed to discover, or, 

 discovering, to report, a flaw in a girder or a brace. To say that 

 the companies failed to provide proper persons to perform these 

 duties, is to say that they were willing to take the risk of losses run- 

 ning into millions rather than spend from five to a hundred dollars 

 in cash. And most people who know any thing, know that (news- 

 paper reporters and leader-writers, even, to the contrary) that is not 

 the way railroads are managed in the United States, at all events. 

 And we may add, that, had it been, the above enumerated acci- 

 dents would not have waited until the year of grace 1887 to have 

 transpired. The railroad-company, then, is at the mercy of its em- 

 ployees. I will not cite figures, because figures can be ' cooked.' 

 But if anybody will sit down and compute the millions spent annu- 



