it occurred to somebody to change the form of
contract with the shipowners, and pay— not for
the number of men embarked, but for the
number landed alive. Losses were, of course,
fairly considered in the bargain, but, the bargain
made, every life saved was money gained, every
life lost was money lost. The shippers at once
appointed medical officers to see to the health of
the convict passengers, and the amount of their
payment from the owners was also made to
depend upon the number of lives saved. The
deaths presently fell from one in ten to one in
forty-six, and at last came to be only one and a
half in a hundred, showing a better state of
health than the same class of men would have
enjoyed at home. Wherever the same principle
has been applied to emigrant ships, it has been
pleasant, says Mr. Chadwick, its chief advocate,
to see shippers cutting holes for ventilation, and
considering their space with a devout regard for
sanitary laws.

The men who receive truths from without,
coming as mere information and advice, with
obstinacy or indifference, give their minds to
them actively when they become questions of
income. If they are to be judged for it, we
know not who will dare to cast the stone.
Owners under whom preventable accidents
constantly occur, are very often generous and kind
men, looked up to with a well-grounded affection
by all their dependents. Accidents, when they
are of any magnitude, do, as the case now stands,
affect the owner's pocket very seriously; but
then they are, until they occur, future and
hypothetical losses, that weigh little in the
balance against present certain gain by
dangerous economy or over-greedy haste in holing.
There is Lord Campbell's Act, too, which
enforces compensation for an accidental injury
from any man by whose neglect it has been
caused. But the proximate cause of an accident
in a mine, is commonly a miner; it is but seldom
that direct responsibility can be traced to the
owner; and if it can, how is a miner's widow,
living upon half-a-crown-a-week parish allowance,
to assert her claim in a law court against
one of the wealthiest men in the county?

Probably the true remedy, not only in the
case of accidents in coal-mines, but in the case of
all accidents, preventable or inevitable, is to
adopt the plan that works perfectly well in
France, and to require every employer to
compensate the sufferer, or the representative of
one who has been killed in his service, without
any consideration of whose fault may have
occasioned the misfortune. The working of the
general rule is far less grievous than the working
of Lord Campbell's Act. In combination
with a free system of insurance by employers
against accident to those in his employ— the cost
being covered by a very minute additional
charge on their productions— such a system
would press on none but those who were
found by insurance-offices to pass beyond the
average of risk in conduct of their business. A
German labourer in France, employed in driving
piles, left his own gang, went to a part of the
works in which he had no business to be, while
there incautiously placed his hand upon a
pile-head that was being driven, and so got it
crushed. The French law made his employer
responsible for compensation, and there was no
injustice felt. The educated man is answerable
for the ignorant; employer and employed are
saved all risk of litigation. The employer's
liability is fixed, reducible to calculation, and
may be met by a proportionate insurance charge
to be reckoned among the expenses of his
business. In the case of collieries, an additional
charge of a penny on the ton of coal
would be enough to meet the heavy average
expense of compensation to the wounded and the
widow.

But what would be the natural effect of such
a system in the working? We may judge from
the experience of fire-offices. In Manchester
the blowing engine for cleaning cotton used to
be in the factory building. Fire-offices required
for this arrangement extra premium of insurance,
and the blowing engines are now all in
detached buildings. Cotton waste, liable when
in heaps to ignite spontaneously, would vitiate
a policy if kept in the factory. Owners are very
strict in causing it to be removed. Some years
ago, two very destructive fires occurred in
Manchester. One, spread in consequence of the
warehouse being lined with wood paneling; the
other, from fire being communicated to an
out-side wooden cornice. The companies agreed to
charge extra premium for insurance in such
cases, and in a year scarcely one wooden
external cornice or wooden lining to a warehouse
meant to contain valuable property, was to be
found. In the same manner, companies insuring
against accidents in collieries, suspected of
no "maudlin philanthropy," would tax most
heavily the pits in which there was least
precaution against loss of life, would require extra
premium for each cause of danger, and would
make void a policy for the infringement of its
own wholesome conditions. It would be every
owner's interest to qualify for insurance at the
lowest premium by using all the fair precautions
against accident.

In the case of the safety-lamps, for example,
it is said that the men will open them and use
the naked light. But the great northern
district, in which there is especial risk from
fire-damp, contributes only twenty-one out of
the two hundred and forty-eight annual deaths
from explosion. As much care taken everywhere
as they take in the north, would have saved, upon
this item alone, a thousand lives during the last
eight years. Safety-lamps may be locked. There
is a kind of safety-lamp also that cannot be opened
without at the same time extinguishing the light.
One inspector reports that of a hundred and
seventy-two deaths by explosion in his district,
a hundred and seventy-one were attributed to
the use of naked lights, and that out of eleven
hundred and fifty-four such deaths reported in
five years, twelve only occurred where safety-lamps
had been used, all of which were defective.
Another inspector says that " out of one thousand