life a day is sacrificed to one of the two idols,
Obstinacy and Indifference.

In Durham, where the coIlier is son, grandson,
and great-grandson, to a collier, with a line
of mining ancestry, although the nature of the
coal is more than ordinarily dangerous, accidents
are comparatively few. In the midland
counties, where many of the miners come as
strangers to the work, accidents are more
numerous; so you see how it is!  say the
defenders of what is. We do see how it is.
In the northern districts, where the miners
have coal in their very blood, they are not left
to take care of themselves. About one man in
every six is employed, not in coal-getting, but
in superintending ventilation, keeping up roads,
setting timber, removing obstructions, and
attending generally to what is necessary to
safety. In most other parts of the country,
colliers are expected to do these things for
themselves. The annual loss of a hundred
and twenty-six lives in these districts, beyond
the standard of the naturally more dangerous
collieries of the north, is justified by the
fact that the men are less up to their work,
and maintained by the fact that if they be
twice as much in need of being minded, they
are only half as much helped and looked after.

An explosion is a terrible thing when, as at
Sandhill, it kills at a blow nearly two hundred
men, makes ninety widows, deprives more than
two hundred children of the fathers who put
bread into their mouths. But the miners are
not killed by explosions chiefly. Even more
men are crushed by the fall of coal upon their
heads, for want of sufficient care in setting up
props to support it as the miners push forward
their excavations. The average number of annual
deaths by explosion is two hundred and forty-eight,
by falls of the roof, three hundred and seventy-one
— more than a man a day through the year.
Another kind of accident, killing in some years
more men than are killed by explosion, and on
an average within thirty of the number, would
be most disgraceful to the science of our
engineers, if it were not true that it is almost
wholly preventable. This is the class of accidents
in shafts. Large as the recorded number
is, we have reason to doubt whether it includes
all that happen. Arms and legs are daily
broken, and at least four lives are lost every
week by accidents upon the threshold of their
work. Men are killed by the falling of stone or
coal over the edge of the pit mouth upon them
as they ascend or descend in baskets
unprotected by the caging that would save them
altogether from this kind of risk. Men are thrown
to the bottom out of baskets that would rarely
be dangerous if they were caged and supplied
with proper guide-rods. For want of
proper indicators, signals, and breaks, and the
undivided attention of the engine-driver, men
are drawn over the pulleys. A safety skip
has been invented, simple in construction, so
arranged that the rope is inevitably detached
before the cage reaches the pulley, and the cage
supported at the place it has reached. Its
inventor, Mr. Bailey, is a practical mining
engineer at Wednesbury, but comparatively
little use has been made of his invention.
When the British Association met in Birmingham,
a gentleman advertised that he would
exhibit a contrivance to prevent the sudden
running down of the cage with the men. Persons
of almost every profession went to look at
it, and expressed their high approval of it, but
not a single coal-owner or manager of mines
went to see it. Was it not something "new
fangled," and were not coal-owners already
spending money enough upon their pits? So,
the old sorts of accidents go on as in the old
way, and in the mere entrance shaft, in which
the men spend only the smallest fraction of
their time, one-fifth of all the deaths by violence
occur.

The statements we here make, are mainly
founded on the substance of a paper and
discussion on the subject of accidents in coal-mines,
read and held at the Society of Arts not many
weeks ago. The paper was by P. H. Holland.
The discussion, fairly representing arguments on
both sides of the question, was supported chiefly
by Mr. Edwin Chadwick, Mr. Robert Hunt,
Mr. John Hedley, and Mr. Robert Rawlinson.
The writer of this little summary, compiles from
what he has read, under a deep impression of its
harmony with all that he has seen and known
during years spent in attendance on the sick
and wounded miners of a midland district. When
one has felt every week the grating of a bone
carelessly broken; when one has heard the wail
of the widow in whose little cottage lie the
corpses of her husband and her two stout-hearted
sons, who passed the threshold in the
morning, hale and noisy, to be carried back
over it, ice-cold, and pale, and silent, before the
hour when their daily labour should end, and so
long before the hour when their life labour
should have closed; when one has become
familiar with the sight of young bodies flayed
alive by the scorch of fire-damp, painfully awaiting
death; and when one knows that nearly
half this suffering exists only because it has
existed heretofore, and men are slow to change
the worst of ways when once it has become a
settled way; it is no longer easy placidly to
accept the huge class of Preventable Accidents as
part of the common lot of man.

In the first days of our penal colonisation,
there was in the transport ships for the conveyance
of convicts, a most frightful amount of
preventable death. Fifty, and even sixty per
cent of those who embarked alive, would be
dead at the end of a voyage. There were
complaints, inquiries, promises, and good intentions.
The skippers could point out the recklessness
of sailors who shut hatches down and exclude
necessary air, or will not maintain cleanliness;
it was hard to prevent greedy ship captains from
pressing on the space available for passengers,
by taking an excess of cargo. There was,
however, effort enough made to reduce the
mortality upon the voyage out, to a third or a
fourth part of all the convicts shipped. At last