“It is the common consensus of opinion,” says The New York _Independent_,[103] “among investigators that industrial casualties in this nation number more than 500,000 yearly. Dr. Josiah Strong estimates the number at 564,000. As there are 525,600 minutes in a year, it may readily be seen that _every minute (day and night) our industrial system sends to the grave-yard or to the hospital a human being, the victim of some accident inseparable from his toil_. We cry out against the horrors of war.... But the ravages ... of Industrial warfare are far greater than those of armed conflict. The number of killed or mortally wounded (including deaths from accidents, suicides and murders, but excluding deaths from disease) in the Philippine War from February 4, 1899, to April 30, 1902, was 1,573. These fatal casualties were spread over a period of three years and three months. But one coal mine alone in one year furnished a mortality more than 38 per cent. in excess of this. “The Japanese war is commonly looked upon as the bloodiest of modern wars. According to the official statement of the Japanese Government, 46,180 Japanese were killed, and 10,970 died of wounds. Our industrial war shows a greater mortality year by year. “But we are all of us more familiar with the Civil War, and we know what frightful devastation it caused in households North and South. It was, however, but a tame conflict compared with that which rages today, and which we call ‘peace.’ The slaughter of its greatest battles are thrown in the shade by the slaughter which particular industries inflict today. Ask any schoolboy to name three of the bloodiest battles of that war, and he will probably name Gettysburg, Chancellorsville and Chickamauga. The loss on both sides was: Killed. Wounded. “Gettysburg 5,662 27,203 Chancellorsville 3,271 18,843 Chickamauga 3,924 23,362 —————— —————— Total 12,857 69,408 “But our railroads, state and interstate, and our trolleys in one year equal this record in the number of killings and double it in the number of woundings.... “But whose interest is it that the lives of the workers shall be ... guarded? _The employer class has no material interest_ in the matter. The worker is ‘free,’ _legally_, to refuse to work under dangerous conditions. If, _economically_, he must accept work under these conditions [or starve], that is another matter.” Another witness[104] sets forth the murderous carelessness of the lives of the workers in modern industry thus: