The great peculiarity of the Revere accident, and that which gave a permanent interest to it, lay in the revelation it afforded of the degree in which a system had outgrown its appliances. At every point a deficiency was apparent. The railroads of New England had long been living on their early reputation, and now, when a sudden test was applied, it was found that they were years behind the time. In August, 1871, the Eastern railroad was run as if it were a line of stage-coaches in the days before the telegraph. Not in one point alone, but in everything, it broke down under the test. The disaster was due not to any single cause but to a combination of causes implicating not only the machinery and appliances in use by the company, but its discipline and efficiency from the highest official down to the meanest subordinate. In the first place the capacity of the road was taxed to the utmost; it was vital, almost, that every wheel should be kept in motion. Yet, under that very exigency, the wheels stopped almost as a matter of necessity. How could it be otherwise?--Here was a crowded line, more than half of which was equipped with but a single track, in operating which no reliance was placed upon the telegraph. With trains running out of their schedule time and out of their schedule place, engineers and conductors were left to grope their way along as best they could in the light of rules, the essence of which was that when in doubt they were to stand stock still. Then, in the absence of the telegraph, a block occurred almost at the mouth of the terminal station; and there the trains stood for hours in stupid obedience to a stupid rule, because the one man who, with a simple regard to the dictates of common sense, was habitually accustomed to violate it happened to be sick. Trains commonly left a station out of time and out of place; and the engineer of an express train was sent out to run a gauntlet the whole length of the road with a simple verbal injunction to look out for some one before him. Then, at last, when this express train through all this chaos got to chasing an accommodation train, much as a hound might course a hare, there was not a pretence of a signal to indicate the time which had elapsed between the passage of the two, and employés, lanterns in hand, gaped on in bewilderment at the awful race, concluding that they could not at any rate do anything to help matters, but on the whole they were inclined to think that those most immediately concerned must know what they were about. Finally, even when the disaster was imminent, when deficiency in organization and discipline had done its worst, its consequences might yet have been averted through the use of better appliances; had the one train been equipped with the Westinghouse brake, already largely in use in other sections of the country, it might and would have been stopped; or had the other train been provided with reflecting tail-lights in place of the dim hand-lanterns which