be verified in the experience either of England or of this country, for neither the English nor we possess any statistics in relation to the earlier period; but they have such statistics in France, stretching over the space of more than forty years, and as reliable as statistics ever are. If these French statistics hold true in New England,--and considering the character of our roads, conveyances, and climate, their showing is more likely to be in our favor than against us,--if they simply hold true, leaving us to assume that stage-coach traveling was no less safe in Massachusetts than in France, then it would follow that to make the dangers of the rail of the present day equal to those of the highway of half a century back, some eighty passengers should annually be killed and some eleven hundred injured within the limits of Massachusetts alone. These figures, however, represent rather more than fifty times the actual average, and from them it would seem to be not unfair to conclude that, notwithstanding the great increase of population and the yet greater increase in travel during the last half-century, there were literally more persons killed and injured each year in Massachusetts fifty years ago through accidents to stage-coaches than there are now through accidents to railroad trains. The first impression of nine out of ten persons in no way connected with the operations of railroads would probably be found to be the exact opposite to this. A vague but deeply rooted conviction commonly prevails that the railroad has created a new danger; that because of it the average human being's hold on life is more precarious than it was. The first point-blank, bald statement to the contrary would accordingly strike people in the light not only of a paradox, but of a somewhat foolish one. Investigation, nevertheless, bears it out. The fact is that when a railroad accident comes, it is apt to come in such a way as to leave no doubt whatever in relation to it. It is heralded like a battle or an earthquake; it fills columns of the daily press with the largest capitals and the most harrowing details, and thus it makes a deep and lasting impression on the minds of many people. When a multitude of persons, traveling as almost every man now daily travels himself, meet death in such sudden and such awful shape, the event smites the imagination. People seeing it and thinking of it, and hearing and reading of it, and of it only, forget of how infrequent occurrence it is. It was not so in the olden time. Every one rode behind horses,--if not in public then in private conveyances,--and when disaster came it involved but few persons and was rarely accompanied by circumstances which either struck the imagination or attracted any great public notice. In the first place, the modern newspaper, with its perfect machinery for sensational exaggeration, did not then exist,--having itself only recently come in the train of the locomotive;--and, in