THE ROYAL ARTILLERY INSTITUTION 
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have been most convincingly demonstrated by tbe great good which it 
is admitted on all sides that the inspectors have already succeeded in 
accomplishing, even with the very insufficient powers which the present 
state of the law affords them. The favourite argument of some, that 
Government inspection must operate mischievously, by diminishing 
private responsibility, has certainly received no support from the results 
of inspection, so far as the experiment has been tried. It will scarcely 
be asserted that a manufacturer or store-holder who may have willingly 
adopted, as suggestions which the inspector has no power to enforce, 
measures conducive to the safety of life and property, would be careless 
in the application of those measures because their adoption was no longer 
optional, or because the responsibility for their due observance was to 
some extent shared by the inspector. This very system of inspection 
cannot fail to benefit those interested in different branches of the in¬ 
dustry of explosives, by reducing the necessity for hard and fast rules 
with respect to the arrangement and conduct of works, which might in 
many instances entail hardship or inconvenience without any real neces¬ 
sity, and by strengthening the hands of factory owners, and thus 
rendering comparatively easy the proper observance and enforcement of 
regulations for the safety of the men and the works. It is, however, 
especially in connection with the storage, transport, and employment of 
gunpowder and other explosives in mining districts that efficient 
inspection, supported by the reasonable power which a well considered Act 
of Parliament cannot fail to afford, may be confidently expected to 
produce important beneficial results, not the least of which will probably 
be the wholesome influence exercised indirectly by the force of example 
upon the miner or pitman, whose ignorance has fostered the indifference 
with which long habit has led him to regard the possibility of danger. 
But although improved legislation, and the beneficial regulations thus 
supplied, may be confidently hoped to effect an important reduction in 
the number and magnitude of the disasters now recorded as accidental 
explosions, it would obviously be worse than shortsighted to encourage 
a reliance upon legislation alone as a safeguard against the evils which 
lead to casualties of this kind. Punishments inflicted for transgression 
of the law may engender caution, but the disasters which arise from 
ignorance are not likely to be importantly reduced in number by legis¬ 
lative enactments alone. 
It is to the general promotion of education among the people, and to 
the spread of scientific and technical knowledge, if even of the most 
elementary kind, among employers and employed, that we must look for 
a substantial diminution of these casualties, which the uneducated mind 
is but too prone to attribute to accident, and the prevention of which 
rests, at any rate to a large extent, with those who are at present tacitly 
content to regard them as inevitable. 
