In the case of railroad disasters, however, a striking exception is afforded to this rule. The victims of these, at least, do not lose their lives without great and immediate compensating benefits to mankind. After each new "horror," as it is called, the whole world travels with an appreciable increase of safety. Both by public opinion and the courts of law the companies are held to a most rigid responsibility. The causes which led to the disaster are anxiously investigated by ingenious men, new appliances are invented, new precautions are imposed, a greater and more watchful care is inculcated. And hence it has resulted that each year, and in obvious consequence of each fresh catastrophe, travel by rail has become safer and safer, until it has been said, and with no inconsiderable degree of truth too, that the very safest place into which a man can put himself is the inside of a first-class railroad carriage on a train in full motion. The study of railroad accidents is, therefore, the furthest possible from being a useless one, and a record of them is hardly less instructive than interesting. If carried too far it is apt, as matter for light reading, to become somewhat monotonous; though, none the less, about these, as about everything else, there is an almost endless variety. Even in the forms of sudden death on the rail, nature seems to take a grim delight in an infinitude of surprises. CHAPTER I. THE DEATH OF MR. HUSKISSON. With a true dramatic propriety, the ghastly record, which has since grown so long, began with the opening of the first railroad,--literally on the very morning which finally ushered the great system into existence as a successfully accomplished fact, the eventful 15th of September, 1830,--the day upon which the Manchester & Liverpool railroad was formally opened. That opening was a great affair. A brilliant party, consisting of the directors of the new enterprise and their invited guests, was to pass over the road from Liverpool to Manchester, dine at the latter place and return to Liverpool in the afternoon. Their number was large and they filled eight trains of carriages, drawn by as many locomotives. The Duke of Wellington, then prime minister, was the most prominent personage there, and he with his party occupied the state car, which was drawn by the locomotive _Northumbrian_, upon which George Stephenson himself that day officiated as engineer. The road was laid with double tracks, and the eight trains proceeded in two parallel columns, running side by side and then again passing or falling behind each other. The Duke's train gaily led the race, while in a car of one of the succeeding trains was Mr. William Huskisson, then a member of Parliament for Liverpool and eminent among the more prominent public men of the day as a financier and economist. He had been very active in promoting the construction of the Manchester & Liverpool road, and now that it was completed he