The Way Lives are Wasted

image 1image 2image 3image 4cropped image 1

THE WAY LIVES ARE WASTED.

Our people seem to be the most indifferent to human life of any on the face of the earth. There is no country where anything like the number of fatal accidents occur during the year as take place here. Now it is a tremendous explosion on the Mississippi, in which hundreds of lives are lost by criminal rashness and carelessness—now it is the fall of a building in the city, due only to insecure construction—now this, now that, but the fact is almost always patent that in all these cases valuable lives might have been saved and great suffering prevented merely by the exercise of a little forethought and discretion, by a little conscientious care on the part of employers toward those committed to their charge.

Foreigners accuse us, and with no little justice, of being so absorbed in the pursuit of gain that conscience, honor, even common feeling are swallowed up in the mad race after dollars. Some recent examples—so very recent indeed as to require no specification—would seem to bear them out in their allegations. One thing is certain. The law is unquestionably deficient in not imposing a sufficient penalty upon those who wantonly expose their employees to the daily risk of their lives through the insufficiency of proper safe-guards against accident, and who, for the sake of a little paltry lucre run the risk of launching the persons working under them at any moment, into eternity. In nearly all the cases the usual cry is,—“nobody to blame.” But the blame should rest somewhere—somebody should be made responsible for these wholesale slaughters—and it is time that the press and the public should speak out in plain and unmistakable terms. Else the evil will continue unchecked, horrible accidents will continue as heretofore to startle the readers of the daily press, and calamities solely attributable to the recklessness of man, will continue to be set down as “Dispensations of Providence.”