The Express.
London, England, 1867-01-16 00:00:00

BRITANNIA.

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LONDON, lITDNEsDAY, JANUARY 16.

Tun terrible disaster in Regent's-park, which will
darken the memory of this New Year holiday
season in many mounting households, will, we
fear, Jo forgotten before another thaw has been
succeeded by another frost by a public of all
others, on this aide of the Atlantic at least, the
most savagely and stupidly reckless, a public who
resent the commonest measures of precaution
and restraint, however imperfectly devised,
to protect them against the most obvious
dangers and their own folly, as encroach-
ments and assaults upon their public and private
liberty. On Monday last, according to the news-
paper reports, there were about 3,000 people
on the ice in Regent's-park in the morning ; in
the afternoon, when that number was diminished
by perhaps a third, the ice gave way under one
of the skaters ; as it always happens, there was
a general rush to the dangerous spot, and
in a moment twenty-one persons were im-
mersed ; but, thanks to the prompt assistance of
the icemen, all were safely landed, and all alive.
It may be absurdly supposed that an accident
so nearly fatal to so many persons would be a
warning to skaters on the same piece of water next
day ; a warning at least against skating or sliding
upon spots marked out as dangerous, and against
a mob making a rush towards breaking ice, not
from an impulse of irrepressible humanity, but from
a suicidal curiosity, which will not let the regular
iceman do his duty when it can be done. A
warning, indeed ! Your true British public defies
warnings ! Yesterday morning there were at least
as many thousands on the ornamental water in the
Regent's-park as the day before; the " accident,"
which on Monday had nearly coat twenty-one
lives, had probably operated as an attrac-
tion to that mysterious " crowd," who in
this hardworked city are somehow or other
always to be found looking on at something
or at somebody as if they bad nothing else
on earth to do. It had frozen hard all night,
it is true, and the ice might be reasonably trusted to
bear ss well as the day before, but it was rough and
patchy(perhapathe surface of the water was rippled
by the strong wind when the ice took it), and a
Corfu had been clearly and conspicuously drawn
by the icemen in charge round the parts which com-
mon experience and observation alike pronounced
treacherous and unsafe. Of course, among the
thousands on the ice no one was rash enough to
venture beyond this cordon of safety ; of course,
there was no crowding of idlers and lookers-on
where the skaters were thickest, some ingenuous
stranger unacquainted with the British public will
imagine. The plain fact is, that of the thousands
who were present on that piece of water in the
Regent's-park, which extends in a westerly direc-
tion from York-gate to Hanover-gate, and in a
northerly direction to the Inner Circle, at three
p.m. yesterday, when the ice gave way, and in a
moment became a confused hummock of struggling
human heads, by far the greater number were not
skaters at all. Of the skaters, few were better at
the art than a chess player who just knows the
moves ; and the rest were idlers, loungers, lookers
on, men, women, and children, mischievous boys
sliding, "roughs " waiting for "something to turn
" up," and—nursery maids with children. Alas for
the mothers who send out their little ones for a
walk in the Parks in this fine seasonable weather
to avoid the dangers of the streets There was
absolutely nothing in this " accident " (if the
natural and inevitable result of the moat wilful folly
is not rather an involuntary kind of self-murder)
to distinguish it from other " accidents " which
happen daily on almost every piece of public water
in the country during a skating season, except the
unusual number of the immersed, and consequently
of the drowned. There was nothing unusual
in the extent of the ice that gave way, nor indeed
did it give away all at once, so to speak, in a
"sheet," but piece by piece. It would be worse
than mockery to waste words upon that scene of
agony in the midst of all the monstrous vanities,
the atrociously indifferent and careless curiosity
of such a town as London.

If we could only give up just enough of
our native bounce to enable ue to perceive
that recklessness is not courage, or prudence
cowardice, or leave and license to drown oneself
at large liberty ! What, then, in as few words as