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MISCELLANEOUS.-Tobacco, 60; Singular Census
Return, 113; Relic of the French Marine, 212;
Electric Telegraph, 249; Female Knight, 257;
Death of Literary Ladies, 269; The Steam Engine,
278; Death of Mr. Knightburgh, 381; Lord George
Gordon, 384; Literary Piracy, 312; Sale of Pic-
tures of the Hague, 329; Macaulay, 387: Death of
one of Burns's Heroines, 400; A Tea-drinker, 412;
Syria, 419; Ettrick Shepherd's Widow, 430; Span-
ish Bull-fighters, 445; Cheap Place to Live in, 499;
Highland Gathering, 525; Things left behind in the
Exhibition, 551; Interesting Relics, 557.

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114

Smibert's Poems-See Periodicalism.
Synonymes, English-Frazer's Magazine,
Sterling, Carlyle's Life of Athenæum,

270

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546

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Usury and Usurers-Bentley's Miscellany, 345, 455
Unsuccessful, Great Men-Bentley's Miscel
lany,

V.

Victoria, Queen-Tait's Mayazine,

Visit to the Maid of Athens-See Maid,
Visit to the Catacombs of Rome-See Rome.
Vergniaud-Hogg's Instructor,

W.

418

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Westminster, Palace of-Chambers' Journal, . 68
Will, My Uncle's-See My Uncle.

Wilhelm Hauff-British Quarterly Review,
Waterloo, A Frenchman's Excursion to-Bent-

145

ley's Miscellany,

177

. 135

Warmbrunn and Graffenberg-Dublin Univer-
sity Magazine,

313

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ECLECTIC MAGAZINE

OF

FOREIGN LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART.

SEPTEMBER, 1851.

From the Edinburgh Review.

FATAL ACCIDENTS: HOW FAR PREVENTIBLE.*

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ever hitherto been able to control its strength to good purposes; and that the motive powers which have possessed the most terrible force, have been under the most absolute discipline and restraint; that, for instance, when the murderer has fled from his victim on the wings of steam, science has overtaken him by a still speedier messenger, and has ranged the officers of justice at the termination of his flight, standing there calm, instructed, and collected, ready to examine his bloody hands, a hundred miles from the place of crime.

EXEMPTION from fatal accidents, as well as from many minor calamities that flesh is heir to, has long been popularly counted among the blessings of pastoral simplicity. But the probability of any such exemption is questioned by the sceptical: and Arcadia keeps no statistics. This is a controversy, which may well wait. Not so the question, how far we can exempt the denizens of the artificially crowded and restless world in which we live, from any considerable proportion of these evils. Since it is clear that, whether or not it would be abstractly better to go backward,-onward is the direction in which the world is going and must go; and with which human institutions fulfil their Among the various tests of the efficacy that the crowding, the restlessness, the un-social office, surely none can be so sensitive tiring energy of exertion, and the marvellous as the average vitality of the community. fertility of invention which characterise our Whenever anything in them is wrong, if it be own days, will only be enlarged in those of our wrong on a considerable scale, it must tend to descendants. At the very outset of any in- add, with more or less remoteness, to the inquiries bearing on such a subject, it is a security of human life. The promotion of pleasant thing to remember that science has all such worthy inducements to exertion as excite without exhausting the physical and mental energies, the regulated liberty which protects without invading, the high-toned social atmosphere in which depravity cannot live,the external tranquillity which exempts the body from violence, and relieves the mind from anxiety, the well-regulated monetary

* Return of the Number and Nature of the Accidents and the Injuries to Life and Limb which have occurred on the Railways in Great Britain and Ireland, from the 1st of July to the 31st of December, 1850, together with the number of Passengers conveyed during that Period. Ordered to be printed 7th May, 1851.

VOL XXIV. NO L

1

as a foundation, we may safely calculate that
the present population of the United King-
dom is double that of England and Wales
in 1840. Making allowance for the propor-
tional number of violent deaths having in the
mean decreased, we may perhaps now count
them, in round numbers, at 20,000 in the year.
This is in itself a vast mass of calamity. It
would appal the world if it came in consid-
erable instalments. All Europe was startled
by the accident which killed 1200 people at
the rejoicings for the marriage of Marie An-
toinette, and which was in some measure re-

or commercial arrangements which save the
public from fluctuations and convulsions,
the careful removal of external noxious agen-
cies;-all these are more or less the crea-
tures of legislation, and have an influence on
vitality, in so much that where they are ma-
terially deficient,-where men are tyrannical
greedy, dishonest, reckless of the safety of
their fellow-men and of their own, where
they wallow in moral and physical impurity,
and oscillate between abject poverty and un-
certain riches, we may be assured that the
traces of these malign influences, if they pos-
sess any such record, will be palpably mark-peated on that of Marie Louise. Our five
ed in their tables of mortality.

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The statistics of most subjects often present a startling appearance to those who have already arrived on them at independent conclusions of their own. There are few| who would be fortunate enough to approach by guess-work to the exact number of deaths caused by violent accidents in the United Kingdom. Some would enumerate all they remember seeing in newspapers, others would launch into a sea of figures, of which they do not know the actual meaning. In 1838, according to the Report of the Registrar-general, the number of deaths from violence in England and Wales was 11,727. Either there had been some defect in the returns for that year, or the causes of such calamities were decreasing, while population increased for the number in the ensuing year was 11,632; in 1840, 11,594; and in 1841, 11,000. We do not find in the Registrar's Reports of later years the causes of death so separated and distinguished,-at least over the whole kingdom." Scotland and Ireland are both destitute of the valuable machinery of the registration system; so that we know no more directly of vital statistics in these countries, than in China and Japan. But taking the English returns,

:

It might be natural to expect that, as the same uniform classes of facts have to be recorded by him every year, the Reports of the Registrar-general

should be as uniform as an almanac or tide-table. Each annual volume, however, is an independent book with distinct subjects. And a cursory examination of the volumes shows a satisfactory reason for this. The materials collected by the registration system are of the same class every year; but the ways in which they may be used and applied to each other, especially with reference to a succession of years, are infinitely varied. A considerable number of these applications even would occupy too much bulk for an annual Report, and so each year presents its separate combinations: in one, we have the influence of the atmosphere or of politics on mortality-in another, that of trade, on marriages

and births-and so on.

great naval victories in the late war cost us
only 1233 killed, and 3626 wounded; while
20,000 were probably beyond the British loss
in battle in any one of its campaigns. Twen-
ty thousand deaths would have cut no mean
figure in the human sacrifices of Napoleon:
and it will be remembered that the result of
the three bloody days of the battle of Paris
was deemed to be grossly exaggerated when
the deaths were computed at 8,000.

To avert a portion, say a half or a quarter,
of the violent deaths incident to peaceful
occupations, would surely be a great boon
to the community. We see in other depart-
ments of the dark catalogue, what the energy
of man can accomplish in rendering life more
secure. If we look at the element of star-
vation, which in some countries is so con-
spicuous, we shall find that the spirit and
mechanism of English society have been
brought to bear effectually against it, and
that-partly from self-exertion, and partly
from the application of the Poor Law, where
self-exertion has proved insufficient. - the
mortality from this cause, more miserable
yet perhaps than from violence, is compara-
tively small. It was, in 1838, 167; in 1839,
130; and in 1840, 137. The mortality test,
as lately shown to the Metropolitan Associ-
ation, by Dr. Southwood Smith, gauges the
saving of human life which will be effected
by improving the dwellings of the industrious
poor.

Of course, the numbers of the dead only represent a certain per-centage of the direct sufferers on these occasions. How many are injured for every one whose life is extinguished by any class of violent agencies, would be a curious object of inquiry: it would be found to vary greatly with the circumstances which occasion the violence. We happen to alight at this moment on a note of the casualties caused by an attempt, in 1828, to rush out of a church at Kirkcaldy. The Reverend Edward Irving was addressing

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few considerations tending to show how far it is within human power to modify those violent jerks and oscillations of the physical world which snap the thread of life, and scatter the hopes and affections clustering round it in desolation and despair.

In the first place we must set it down as an axiom, that in the accomplishment of such an end money is no object;' that wherever life can be directly and certainly saved, without some counteracting evil,-as for instance, without causing any crime or recklessness that may afterwards have more deleterious effects on vitality, it ought to be saved by the State, at whatever cost. When Captain Hunter, the governor of New South Wales, lost his ship by putting back for a man who had fallen overboard, he vindicated himself before a court-martial by saying that he

a crowded audience; an alarm arose for the safety of the building; 28 of his congregation were crushed to death, and 150 injured. In the first quarterly railway accidents' return for 1851, the number of persons killed 'from circumstances beyond their own control' is 3, the number injured, 33; while, by the class of accidents set down as 'owing to their own misconduct or want of caution,' the passengers killed were 7, those injured only 3. But in the succeeding quarterly return the proportion is still more startling; since, where 9 passengers are killed, 138 are injured from circumstances beyond their own control, though, of passengers suffering from their own misconduct, &c., there are 9 injuries to 13 deaths. A strange and unexpected disproportion this, arising apparently from the injuries caused by slight collisions. But the immediate deaths, or the imme-considered the life of a British seaman of diate wounds, are not all which the public suffer from such calamities. Firt comes that indefinite circle, disappearing as it widens, of those who suffer in their affections, their interests, or their sympathies. But even in the still waters beyond the last perceptible vibration,—where, outwardly indeed, people might not only seem callous to the misfortunes of the sufferers, but selfishly exultng in their own exemption, there is a jarring of the nerves, an inward unsettledness, which makes life uneasy, and expands into positive distress as often as the excited imagination succeeds in drawing analogies between the thinker's position and that of the sufferer. In many instances some permanent shock to the nerves, even madness itself, has been attributed to the circumstances under which the patient became acquainted with some frightful accident. In the case of parties present at any of the great catastrophes, as for example in the Sutton tunnel, who shall venture to sum up the mental horror suffered there by the 1,500 victims for three quar- As the statistics of this element of mortality ters of an hour, amidst damp and darkness, are so imperfect at home, we cannot expect to obtain uproar and confusion, the finding of the them in a very complete state in foreign countries. In France, according to some tables published by dead and wounded, while the work of death the Registrar-general, accidental deaths were, in was going on at intervals, no one knowing 1848, 6,436, and in 1844, 6,729. This would be a when the next remorseless crash would come, small comparative number, if it formed a considerand whom and how many it would slay! able proportion of the kinds of death counted vio Could the calling over of the guillotine lists lent in England. But while their habits of life are exposed to much fewer risks, there is on the other n the Parisian prisons be an ordeal of great-hand an excess of those worst kinds of violent death er agony? Yet the primary cause of all which are excluded from our consideration on this this horror was an engine insufficient for the occasion. Thus, in 1843 the murders were 306, and weight attached to it. in 1844, they were 403. In England, the number of murders in 1840 was 65, and the number in the two preceding years was 156-being an average of 78 for each year. In France, the suicides werefor 1848, 2,142, and for 1844, 2,200. In 1839, the cumber in England was 943.

Perhaps we have said quite enough, but the importance of the matter will not be questioned; and it will be no waste of the reader's time if we can present him with a

more value than any ship in his Majesty's navy;' and we have always considered the remark as sound as it was humane, presuming it to be applied to circumstances where neither the national defence nor the safety of others would be endangered. Nulla unquam de vita hominis cunctatio longa est. If a human being is in risk of his life, and can possibly be saved; in case a well, for instance, has fallen in, or a building has given way, and there is one beneath who may yet be spared to breathe and live with his fellow men,-is there any wealth, or labour, or enthusiasm, that will be withheld to procure his rescue? Indeed, large as we have calculated the number of deaths by violence, we question whether the proportion would be as small in any other country exposed to an equal multiplicity of dangers. The cool indifference to life, by which as late as the time of Henry the Eighth we were supposed to be nationally distinguished, has passed into

*

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