--------------------------------------------------+------------ | Miles. +------------ The average number of miles { United Kingdom | 194,892,255 a passenger can travel without { New York | 172,965,362 being killed. { Massachusetts | 503,568,188 | The average number of miles { United Kingdom | 6,992,662 a passenger can travel without { New York | 13,940,754 being injured. { Massachusetts | 23,955,630 --------------------------------------------------+------------ From this it will be seen that in the United Kingdom the average distance a passenger may travel before being killed is about equal to twice the distance of the Earth from the Sun. In New York he may travel a distance greater than that of Mars from the Sun; and in Massachusetts he can comfort himself with the thought that he may travel twenty-seven millions of miles farther than the distance of Jupiter to the Sun before suffering death on the rail. The most encouraging feature of these statistics is the fact that the number of railway accidents per mile in the United States has shown a marked decrease each year. Taking the figures adopted by the Massachusetts commissions, the number of persons injured in the year 1880-81 was 2,126, and in 1886-87, 2,483, while in the same time the number of miles in operation increased from 93,349 to 137,986. The amounts paid annually by railways in satisfaction of claims for damages to passengers are serious items of expenditure, and in the United States have reached in some years nearly two millions of dollars. About half of the States limit the amount of damages in case of death to $5,000, the States of Virginia, Ohio, and Kansas to $10,000, and the remainder have no statutory limit. In the year 1840 the number of miles of railway per 100,000 inhabitants in the different countries named was as follows: United States, 20; United Kingdom, 3; Europe, 1; in the year 1882, United States, 210; United Kingdom, 52; Europe, 34. In the year 1886 the total number of miles in the United States was 137,986; the number of passengers carried, 382,284,972; the number carried one mile, 9,659,698,294; the average distance travelled per passenger, 25.27 miles. In Europe the first-class travel is exceedingly small and the third class constitutes the largest portion of the passenger business, while in America almost the whole of the travel is first class, as will be seen from the following table: