“‘A conductor and his crew feel a sense of responsibility for the lives of those upon a train. A man can only be worked so far when he becomes actually irresponsible. I hate to feel that I am in any way responsible for the lives of passengers on a train when the length of the run and hours have worked me beyond my limit. There is no flagman on the train, and the brake-man has to help load baggage, brake, flag, and do anything that comes up. He is certainly not in good condition to be an alert flagman on the latter end of the run.’”[4] Footnote 4: “In the matter of rigging the stock-market the American railroad manager has no superior. In the matter of providing safe and expeditious facilities for transportation he has no inferior in any nation of the first rank. He can manipulate political conventions. He can debauch legislatures. He can send his paid attorneys to Congress and sometimes put them on the bench. In these matters he is a master, just as he is a master in the art of issuing and juggling securities. It is only in the operation of railroads that he is deficient. The mere detail of transporting lives and property safely and satisfactorily he seems to regard as unworthy of his genius. His equipment is usually inadequate. His road-bed is generally second class or worse. His employees are undisciplined and his system is archaic. Whatever the causes may be, the fact remains that, judged by the results of operation, the American railroad manager is incompetent, and the records of death and disaster prove it.”—_New York World._ In the same way it is cheaper for a theatre-manager to bribe police officials with free tickets than to comply with the regulations of the Fire Department; and so it is that five or six hundred people are burned up in five minutes. It is easier to bribe a building inspector than it is to put steel rivets in a building, and so you have a Darlington Hotel collapse, and kill ten or twenty workingmen. And a few weeks later came the _Slocum_ disaster, and a helpless steamboat captain was punished, and the responsible capitalists not even named. At the same time, in Trenton, New Jersey, some other capitalists were arrested for making life-preservers with iron bars in them. Of course they were not punished, for everyone understands that such things cannot be helped. In 1893 the number of miners killed in the United States and Canada was two and fifty-three hundredths per thousand; in 1902 it was three and fifty-one hundredths. Better precautions against accidents were one of the demands for making which the miners of Colorado were strung up to telegraph poles, shut in bull-pens, beaten and “deported.” Their mortality was thirty-two per thousand in ten years; the mortality among railroad brake-men is now thirty-two per thousand in _two_ years, so it was very unreasonable of the miners to complain.