RAILWAY ACCIDENTS.
EVERY Railway accident is a sensation, but it has always been a matter of wonder to us that the world takes Railway accidents as calmly as it does. There is a kind of thrill, no doubt, over each occurrence when it has produced death, and the papers are full of detailed accounts, but a similar amount of slaughter oc- curring in any other way would, we fancy, generate a much more per- manent excitement. If half the number of respectable persons now killed in England by Railway accidents were annually slaughtered in groups of from six to twenty by brigands, or insurgents, or any other variety of human beings, England would be convulsed, and society could hardly be held together till the evil had been stayed. If the chance of a "Bremerhaven crime" were equal to the chance of a great railway accident, passengers could hardly be tempted on board ship, no vessel would leave our shores without the most minute inspection by officers of the highest class, and the re- pressive laws would probably become as ferocious as the Tudor statutes against poisoning. Yet Thomassen's victims would have died easily compared with the sufferings, say, in an accident such as that in which Lord Farnham perished in 1868. If the bunting- field, or the race-course, or the yachting water witnessed scenes as sanguinary and dramatic, hunting, racing, and yachting would be prohibited by law, with the universal consent of the popula- tion. As for slaughter by natural but avoidable causes, if any hill in England occasionally proved itself as dangerous to life, say, by emitting showers of stones, as every great ,trunk railway does, a visit to that hill, except on some peremptory call of duty, would be considered sinful, and would be prohibited, except under licenses granted with scrupulous care. Men would hear of small massacres of their relatives, say, by menageries broke loose, or by recurring landslips, or by storms at sea, with the sort of fury with which they listen to a Plimsoll, and would besiege Parliament with prayers and projects for a remedy. They can hardly bear to hear of death by torture, yet the commonest form of death by rail- way accident is exactly the torture prescribed by our ancient law for accused persons who refused to plead. The victims are pressed to death. They resent executions for crime, yet listen, if not calmly, at least quietly to the slaughter of innocent persons by causes most of them preventible. The calmness is the stranger, because every incident which is supposed to stir the imagination more deeply than the mere fear of death is present in a railway accident. Men dread most acutely those evils to which they themselves are liable—for example, no man living in England is quite as moved by the story of an earthquake as he would be if he were residing on the "earthquake belt"—and we are all liable to be killed, or mutilated, or made idiots of, the next time we take seats in any train. The danger is permanent, and the risk seldom postponed beyond a week. Men feel misfortunes that are dramatic much more than mis- fortunes that are ordinary ; are more pitiful, for example, about an explosion in a mine than about an equal slaughter by a "cold snap ;" bur no cause of death is so dramatic as a railway accident, no other more sudden, or appalling, or unexpected. No drama involving death is transacted so completely under the miscroscope. Men feel, it is sometimes cynically said, not for the beasts that perish, but for the beasts that cry when perishing, the silence of fishes being the grand reason for our disregard of them ; but the sufferers by a railway overact are of the most audible order, fill newspapers with narratives, instruct Counsel to ask for damages, and fill the Courts with petitions for redress. Men fear pain, and especially pain from fractures, more than death, and no tragedy involves such ghastly and long-continued forms
of suffering as a railway accident. Its specialty is not massacre, but massacre with an accompaniment of broken limbs, and riven muscles, and shattered nerves, and strokes of paralysis, and sudden blindnesses, and visitations of mania or idiotcy. The peculiar horror of an epidemic like cholera, or scarlet-fever, or the plague, is the extent of its area, which is so regulated by Providence or by the laws which govern malaria that it strikes entire households, and a man, himself unscathed, may in a day find himself—we quote an actual case from the last cholera year—motherless, wifeless, childless, alone, with a lifelong resent- ment in his heart that he was not taken too. That is the horror, too, of a railway accident like this at Abbots Ripton. Cholera
could scarcely strike a household more terribly than the blunder or accident which delayed the shunting of the coal train, struck the family of a gentleman of Newcastle, Mr. R. San- derson, who, himself pierced with a dozen wounds, his thigh broken, his collar-bone fractured, his arm in two, his back and head contused, his nerves shattered, and his capacity for hard work probably gone for ever, wakes in hospital to find himself nursed by a wife with a broken wrist, who is mourning for two daughters, both grown women, killed in the very fullness of hope and strength, and by a son saved almost by miracle from the same fate. Mr. Dion Boucicault, who is from professional necessity a wanderer, might have had his whole household in the train instead of only a son whose character made him a delight to his friends. Nor is that the worst. Most men share Dr. Johnson's feeling, and could weep most easily over the -wretched passenger who, demented by the shock, kept calling to the guard, "Do we change the train here ?" No catastrophe is more dramatically horrible than that, and none, as Mr. Erichsen's terrible book bears witness, is more frequent in railway accidents, though no doubt the form of the mental alienation is usually quiescent. The mind usually suffers from the shock as if it had in a moment produced extreme senility, and perfect recovery is in a large number of cases absolutely hopeless.
Nevertheless, in spite of all this—in spite, that is, of a risk which, though only oce,asionallk iealised, is perennial, and involves con- sequences far worse than those risks which usually terrify men—it is certain that men take little trouble to enforce proper precau- tions in railway travelling, refuse altogether to pay a little more to secure them—for example, a pilot-engine to each train would render accident to the train most improbable, and its use is a mere matter of cost—and are not, except in individual cases, 'terrified by recurrent accidents. As many travellers will pass Abbot's Ripton next week as passed it last, and will note the place with interest, but without keen alarm. Railway shares are affected by the compensations to be paid, but not by the diminution of traffic to be feared, and people will encounter what is a very serious risk—for the proportions of the 'killed have no more effect on their imaginations than the usual proportions in a battle have on soldiers—twice a day every week- day of their lives. The cause of that indifference is a curious subject of speculation, and the popular explanations are by no means satisfactory. The usual one is habit, but we do not find that people who travel by train once a week or month fear acci- dents more than those who travel once a day, and no one can be said -to have a habit of surviving accidents. Besides, habit in many cases induces, not callousness, but nervousness. Old soldiers, as Wellington said, get increasingly afraid of the shot—though, as the advantages of discipline come home to them, and professional pride grows strong, they are also increasingly reluctant to run away—the fear of lightning increases with every thunderbolt, and the dread of earthquakes in places like Valparaiso develops into a constitutional habit, moving people, for example, to escape while still asleep. The dread of fire, which in many persons rises -to a mania, is developed without the occurrence of special dangers of fire, without any occasional facing of a special ordeal ; and the dread of the dark cannot be cured, though it may be prevented, by .merely encountering it. The courage of Railway travellers is often said to be the result of calculation, the proportion of injuries to miles travelled being so small ; but the calculation is not widely 'known, and if it were, would frighten a very unmoved class, the holders of season-tickets, whose risk, arithmetically considered, is -very great indeed. And finally, it is often said that as people must travel, and cannot travel in any other way, they expel the fear from their minds, fear, of all the emotions, submitting most easily to the persistent exercise of the will. There is a little truth in that, particularly as regards a few individuals who are habitually afraid of Railway travelling; but our case is that the majority of people do not suppress the fear, but do not experience it, and will go out to dinner by train after a railway accident just as readily as before one. It may be that want of experience has something to do with it, as it certainly has with the popular indifference to the certainty of death—the experienced telling us that no -one who has gone through an accident ever feels safe in a train again—but we suspect the nearest explanation is more like this :—The dread of a railway accident is a prospective and not an actual dread, as you see none of the symptoms till the catastrophe happens, and men feel a prospective dread in proportion to the necessity for action which the thing dreaded will involve. If there will be a call on them, if they are to "behave," or to act, or to be responsible, then a prospective dread excites them ; but if they are not, they feel the
calm which, in some circumstances, is called passive courage, and which is, of all the useful qualities, the most widely distributed. The passenger knows that an accident may or may not happen, but in neither case will he be called on to behave, or to act, or to prevent. It will be over before he knows it, and nothing he can do or leave undone will in the smallest degree affect the result. He will not even see the danger, as in the ease of lightning or a fire ; or hear it, as in the case of earthquake, but must perforce be completely passive up to the last instant. That passiveness suits the majority of mankind, who are frightened mainly through the ears, or the eyes, or the imagination, and can bear without alarm dangers which are on them before they can realise their approach. They know they may happen on any journey, as they know that death may happen on any day, but they realise the one risk just as little as the other, and go on, not indeed unfearing, but un- fearing for that particular occasion, which is all to which they will give their minds.
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