More than a hundred people had gone to death in the crash of two thundering passenger trains in Colorado, a crash that had been due to the failure of an engineer to heed the plainest of signals. Two train wrecks in northern England had taken a toll of life almost as great, and there were reports of many other crashes from various parts of earth. In every one the accident had been due to the inexplicable failure of the human element, the failure of dispatcher or switchman or engineer to perform the duty that habit should have made automatic. In one case, that of the Austrian disaster, the crash had been directly caused by the sudden craziness of a switchman, who, for some slight grievance, had sent a long passenger-train crashing through an open switch and down an embankment. There was news as terrible from the seas. Wireless reports flashed thick with word of ships that had blundered fatally on rocks or shoals by fault of helmsman or navigating officer. The greater part of these, fortunately, were freight-ships of medium and small size, but one case sent a thrill of horror through earth, already steeped in horror. That was when the great transatlantic liner _Garonia_, bound to Southampton, crashed by night into the southern Irish coast with the resulting loss of three-fourths of the thousand humans it carried. And that wreck, like the others, was due to an utterly inexplicable failure of the ship's personnel. Smaller in magnitude, but taking a total of far more lives, were the unnumbered accidents that took place in the thickly populated and highly mechanized countries of North America and Europe. The number of automobile deaths, always staggering America, reached a stunning total in those last fateful days of September. Crashes took place at every corner, and the running down of pedestrians became a common occurrence everywhere. Many cars mowed a path of death through street and sidewalk before they were halted, their drivers losing apparently all faculty of control of them. And in mill and shop and factory death's grim hand was reaping as thickly. Men, upon whom the lives of many depended, suddenly lost control of their machines and sent those many to death. Countless others were mangled or crushed to death by the great mechanisms they had operated for years without mishaps. Airplane crashes became so numerous that many sections of the world peremptorily forbade all further flying until the cause of it all could be ascertained. It was as though more and more of the masses of men were becoming incapable of handling the mechanisms, of conducting the operations, that they had been executing for years. Was mankind going collectively insane?