January 27, 1888.] 



SCIENCE. 



47 



duties none the less rigid in case of accident than when all goes 

 well, and are at their posts, saving life and property, and prevent- 

 ing further destruction by signals, and have neither the time nor the 

 right to instruct reporters ; though, I may add, their silence is always 

 taken as a final confession of guilt on the part of the company. 

 Indeed, on reading the average American newspaper accounts of 

 railway disasters, I have repeatedly found myself exclaiming, " Why 

 did not this dastardly and murderous company complete the cata- 

 logue of its crimes by braining the survivors with crowbars, and 

 adding to its ill-gotten wealth by impartially pillaging the dead 

 bodies of all its victims ? " I once had occasion to investigate an 

 accident which derailed a way-train, throwing it over the double 

 track and immediately before an express-train coming in the oppo- 

 site direction, almost exactly upon the time when the express-train 

 was due at the point where the derailment occurred. Upon the trial 

 of a resulting lawsuit, the crew of the wrecked train testified unani- 

 mously to the fact : the company's time-table and the registers of 

 the train-despatchers at both ends of the division (which could not 

 have been disturbed without throwing the whole business of the 

 road into chaos) proved it. But some passengers whom the unusual 

 sensation of escaping from destruction had unnerved, and to whom 

 a series of crowded and unique experiences had made a few moments 

 seem like hours, testified that there had been ample time to flag the 

 express-train (some of them putting the interval at several hours) ; 

 and the jury unanimously believed the passengers as against the 

 company's witnesses, and thus morally convicted the employees of 

 perjuring themselves under orders, in order to mulct a corporation 

 in damages. Juries from the interior do these things as regularly 

 as the opportunities present themselves ; and the excuse lies, not in 

 the opportunity, but in the nature of things, and in the axiom that 

 ' bigotry ' and ' ignorance ' are synonymous terms. But unfortu- 

 nately there is no such palliation or excuse for the ready writers and 

 composers of leaders on the staff of our great newspapers : for these 

 are cultivated gentlemen, who know perfectly well that railway cor- 

 porations avoid accidents as they avoid bankruptcy, and enforce a 

 ceaseless and enlightened vigilance to prevent them ; that railway 

 companies do not practise small economies, do not risk bankruptcy 

 (for a single great accident, like that at Revere, may bankrupt, as 

 that one actually bankrupted, an entire corporation) for the sake of 

 a few dollars, yet, knowing this, persist in telling the public that 

 railways are careless of public rights, and indifferent to human life. 

 To be sure, these gentlemen do not second the religious press in 

 advising that locomotive-engineers and East River pilots read their 

 Bibles when on duty, — a habit which would doubtless largely in- 

 crease the perils of steam-transportation ; but they often, as we shall 

 see, make suggestions quite as invaluable. 



On the evening of Tuesday, Dec. 20, 1887, there luas not a bloody 

 and terrible disaster on the Elevated Railroad in this city. A train 

 packed with human beings was not precipitated into a narrow 

 street below, crowded with men, women, and children ; horses, 

 trucks, and vans. The wheels of a particular train, upon that oc- 

 casion, left the track, but the prudence and skill of the builders of 

 the elevated structure vindicated themselves : the jar never de- 

 flected it an atom, the stout sleepers held the train, and nobody was 

 scratched. But no one, on reading the leaders printed in the daily 

 newspapers of this city, would have supposed that a terrible calam- 

 ity had been averted. Had that entire train, full of human beings, 

 been precipitated upon these passing men and women, horses, 

 trucks, and vans, the daily newspapers could not have censured the 

 Manhattan Elevated Railway Company more emphatically than 

 they did ; or drawn for the occasion more vigorous and virtuous 

 lessons of the greed of railway corporations, and of the woes of a 

 long-suffering public. While every practical railway man in the 

 country must have admired the perfect and almost automatic con- 

 struction which saved so much waste of life and property on that 

 occasion, not a newspaper commended the management, but rather 

 took an additional opportunity of vilifying railroads in general, and 

 the Manhattan Railway Company in particular. I did not read all 

 the eloquent leaders with which the press improved the occasion of 

 the non-occurrence of an appalling disaster on the New York Ele- 

 vated Railroad ; but I remember one, that, after feelingly dilating 

 on the ghastly picture of gore and agony which was not presented 

 on that occasion, exclaimed, — 



" We must require of those who undertake such responsibilities 

 absolute security, not a pretty tolerable degree of safety. It is not 

 enough that accidents shall not be frequent : they must be impos- 

 sible. The system must be managed on the principle that there 

 are no railroad accidents ; that what are called such are due Xo 

 some species of neglect, which truly competent management could 

 and would have prevented " (Commercial Advertiser, Dec. 22, 

 1887). If the gentleman who wrote those words will continue to- 

 walk uprightly and piously before men unto his life's end, will read 

 his catechism and endeavor to reflect its precepts in his daily gait 

 and conversation, he will doubtless eventually proceed to a vicinage 

 beyond this fitful fever of life where accidents are ' impossible.' I 

 doubt if he finds it upon this poor planet. But, although perfectly 

 innocuous to those as clever as himself, is. it not manufacturing a 

 dangerous public sentiment — and one as unpatriotic as it is dan- 

 gerous — to constantly kindle and fan the impression, that, of all 

 the necessary industries which civilization requires, the industry of 

 maintaining a railway, or any thing that runs by steam, is a greedy 

 and despotic power, that lives by crushing not only the bones of 

 passengers, but the civil liberties of the people .'' If it is, and if it is 

 wrong to do dangerous and unpatriotic deeds, then the gentlemen 

 who write these feverish and furious leaders — unless they repent 

 — will certainly never behold the land where no accidents happen. 

 I may add, perhaps, as germane to my text, that the newspapers 

 all appear to agree, that, if nobody was kiUed the other evening at 

 Franklin Street, it was not the fault of the Manhattan Elevated 

 Railway Company, but a genuine ' act of God.' 



" In a recent number of Science" says the Evening Post, " Mr. 

 Appleton Morgan has published an article, entitled 'The Act of 

 God and the Railway Company,' in which he tries to palliate or even 

 to deny the responsibility of the corporations for. most of the serious 

 railroad accidents of the past year. We have of late become quite 

 accustomed to such pleas on behalf of the Anarchists ; but when 

 the same line of argument is invoked in favor of a railway company,, 

 by a lawyer of Mr. Morgan's standing, it is a surprise, and by no 

 means a welcome one." I myself do not see what I have to da 

 with the Anarchists, or the Anarchists with me. An Anarchist is 

 one who intrudes upon the still unsettled problem of labor versus 

 capital, and proposes solving it by eliminating the element of labor, 

 and substituting cataclysm therefor. The idea of cataclysm may 

 have suggested a railway accident, otherwise the Post's correspond- 

 ence of ideas does not impress me as important. Proceeding : the 

 Post is astonished that 1 should have given an account of the For- 

 est Hill disaster at variance with the official report of the Massa- 

 chusetts Board of Railway Commissioners who investigated it, say- 

 ing, " We do not understand how it was possible for a writer of 

 good standing to disregard these facts. Either he must have pre- 

 sumed on the ignorance of his readers, or else he never took the 

 trouble to look into the matter itself. The latter is perhaps the 

 more charitable supposition. But it need hardly be said that for a 

 writer in a scientific periodical either excuse is equally weak.'^ 

 Doubtless the Post did not, at that writing, understand how any- 

 body could prefer the report of experts to the official reports of non- 

 experts upon so complicated an affair as a railway accident. But 

 it ought to have had some glimmering of an idea as to how such a 

 preference was possible, a day or so later, when itself printed prom- 

 inently, and without comment, the following item : " After a num- 

 ber of weeks spent in the investigation of the Chatsworth train- 

 wreck, the Illinois Railroad and Warehouse Commission has sub- 

 mitted to Governor Oglesby a report stating, that, in their opinion, 

 the ' train would not have been destroyed if the bridge had not 

 burned before the train reached it.' " Before so masterly an analy- 

 sis of the casuistry of proximate causes, no wonder the Evening 

 Post was speechless. The Illinois Commission found that the 

 Chatsworth disaster would not have happened had the bridge fal- 

 len before the fated train reached it. Their Massachusetts contempo- 

 raries reported, that, had the bridge-inspector been discharged be- 

 fore he reported the bridge safe, the fated train would never have 

 attempted to run over it. I do not, upon the whole, see much to 

 choose between them. As I write, word comes that the Minne- 

 sota Board of Railway Commissioners, as if emulous to compete in 

 usefulness with its compeers of Illinois and Massachusetts, had 

 decreed that no upper berths in Pullman sleeping-coaches must be 



