glimmered on its rear platform, it could hardly have failed to make its proximity known. Any one of a dozen things, every one of which should have been but was not, ought to have averted the disaster. Obviously its immediate cause was not far to seek. It lay in the carelessness of a conductor who failed to consult his watch, and never knew until the crash came that his train was leisurely moving along on the time of another. Nevertheless, what can be said in extenuation of a system under which, at this late day, a railroad is operated on the principle that each employé under all circumstances can and will take care of himself and of those whose lives and limbs are entrusted to his care? There is, however, another and far more attractive side to the picture. The lives sacrificed at Revere were not lost in vain. Seven complete railroad years passed by between that and the Wollaston Heights accident of 1878. During that time not less than two hundred and thirty millions of persons were carried by rail within the limits of Massachusetts. Of this vast number while only 50, or about one in each four and a half millions, sustained any injury from causes beyond their own power to control, the killed were just two. This certainly was a record with which no community could well find fault; and it was due more than anything else to the great disaster of August 26, 1871. More than once, and on more than one road, accidents occurred which, but for the improved appliances introduced in consequence of the experience at Revere, could hardly have failed of fatal results. Not that these appliances were in all cases very cheerfully or very eagerly accepted. Neither the Miller platform nor the Westinghouse brake won its way into general use unchallenged. Indeed, the earnestness and even the indignation with which presidents and superintendents then protested that their car construction was better and stronger than Miller's; that their antiquated handbrakes were the most improved brakes,--better, much better, than the Westinghouse; that their crude old semaphores and targets afforded a protection to trains which no block-system would ever equal,--all this certainly was comical enough, even in the very shadow of the great tragedy. Men of a certain type always have protested and will always continue to protest that they have nothing to learn; yet, under the heavy burden of responsibility, learn they still do. They dare not but learn. On this point the figures of the Massachusetts annual returns between the year 1871 and the year 1878 speak volumes. At the time of the Revere disaster, with one single honorable exception,--that of the Boston & Providence road,--both the atmospheric train-brake and the Miller platform, the two greatest modern improvements in American car construction, were practically unrecognized on the railroads of Massachusetts. Even a year later, but 93 locomotives and 415 cars had been equipped even with the train-brake.