Neither employees nor company can be held to blame or can prevent accidents resulting from the first and second causes, and fortunately for the reputation as well as the treasury of the companies over one-half of all the fatalities and a large proportion of the seriously injured come under the second class, and until the life and limb of a trespasser (10 per cent or 1,000 of the 10,000 killed and injured on the railroads of this country every year being children under fourteen years of age) are considered to be of some value to their families and to the State, they will not only continue to occur, but will increase each year as our population and traffic grow. Accidents caused by carelessness, thoughtlessness, or neglect of employees are the large majority of all that happen, and if we could eliminate them, or one-half of them, there would be little cause for complaint on the part of the management of the companies, or criticism on the part of the public, and the claim agent would have a bed of roses instead of the busiest and hardest worked office on the road, and I believe that when the employees really understand the matter many of them will be eliminated. We should bear in mind that it is not the great train accidents that make the large majority of the total deaths and injuries on the railroads of this country, about which so much is said in the public press, but it is the little cases that are unheralded in the press, or in the courts, that make the totals so large; the little things that are happening every day, on every railroad in the country, which go on happening every year in the same old way, and they are the cases which could and should be avoided by the exercise of greater care and thoughtfulness--more of them come from thoughtlessness than any other cause. My experience leads me irresistibly to the conclusion that after all it is the _man_, not the safety appliance, that we must depend on to prevent accidents, as has been demonstrated by any number of cases that have occurred at points where the track has been lined with safety appliances. The Cause INJURIES TO PASSENGERS Injuries to passengers for which employees are at fault, and which could and should be avoided, result from collisions, derailments, improper handling and management of trains and stations, and I will, by way of illustration, cite a few cases which have occurred and tell you how, in my opinion, they might have been avoided. We will first take those caused by collisions: At Forest Station, April 2, in which 3 passengers were killed and 26 injured, caused by train No. 112, upon which they were riding, being run into by engine No. 405, hauling train No. 2, Engineman Jackson, at 4 p.m.