Comparatively speaking, public attention has been but slightly directed in any specific way to the matter of accidents to employees on American railroads. It is certainly one of the most distressing features to be studied in connection with the safety problem. Collisions, derailments, defective hand-holds and brake apparatus, and the like, cause injuries to great numbers of employees. For example, at Haverhill, N. H., the other day, five employees were instantly killed, through the alleged carelessness or oversight of a fellow employee. Such instances, of course, are particularly painful topics for discussion among railroad men, and yet this is the kind of an accident one reads about in the newspapers almost daily. But in twenty-four hours the reading public will forget the very worst of these accidents to employees. Their frequency takes the edge off their significance. During the year 1907, on a single American railroad, 104 employees were killed outright, and 3575 were injured. The cost of these accidents to the railroad in question was something like $285,000. With an employers’ liability law in force and operation, as in countries abroad, the increase in total paid to employees alone on this road would have carried the aggregate to half a million dollars. The magnitude and importance of the safety problem in relation to employees is still more evident when we consider that for the year ending June 30, 1907, the casualty list on American railroads shows a total of all persons killed, from all causes, of 5000, and injured 72,286; the totals for employees alone being 4353 killed and 62,687 injured. The following figures in regard to actual train accidents and the casualties resulting therefrom show a rather discouraging state of affairs, from the fact that the employees themselves were in the main responsible for them. In 1904 the killed and injured employees in train accidents numbered 7834; in 1905, 7850; in 1906, 8362; and in 1907, 9935. As with all other items, so with accidents to employees, the total of casualties has largely increased year by year. But one of the most distressing features to be considered in connection with accidents to employees, whether caused by their own carelessness or otherwise, is the absolute indifference with which news and statistics of such casualties _appear_ to be received by the average railroad man. So far as an impartial investigator would be able to discover, “It’s too bad” is about the limit of criticism and action in such matters. The indifference I call attention to, so far as the minds of the employees are concerned, is not real, and the actual reason and history of the seeming neglect can easily be located and analyzed. [Illustration: WHAT COMES FROM A MISPLACED SWITCH]