The daily morning journal and courier., 1904-06-16

Nedriy elSnL thousand, or, to De eX- act, 1912 persons in the five boroughs of this Greater city were reported to the police and health authorities during the past year to have met with aceiden- l tai deaths or to be unaccountably miss ing. This is the astonishing revelation disclosed in the mortuary report filed with the department of health. It sug- gests the startling question whether death and danger are more native to peace than to war.
 Vastly exceeding, as this does, the number of actual fatalities recorded of the Spanish-American war, and remem- bering that while war is an intermit- tent evil, this alarming death roll is growing rather than diminishing from year to year, the startling answer is that peace is far more dangerous than war in the matter of earning daily livelihood.
 If the wayfarer have imagination and insight and a degree of human sympa- thy such an excursion may be some thing like a trip through chamber of horrors. Why? Because a wayfaring observer in the iron realms of toll may be haunted by the ghoulish law of life the belief that all life to exist must destroy life-that men somehow are driven along in discord or consonance with the throbbing of the strange ma chine of fate.
 Staring from the new suspension gin the journey. Seven lives have been fed on by the giant spider of industry in spinning the vast web that now laces Manhattan and Long Island together in marvellous network of cables and strands known as the Williamsburg bridge. To-day the great spider broods and loundes with tired eyes half open in contemplating the work now nearing completion. The thousands of specta- tors who saw the bridge dedicated a few months ago hardly realize the peril that the huge contract meant and means for the builders. Every working day tiny black specks have been plod- ding to and fro in a tangle of ropes and cables that resemble fairy threads from below.
 Those shadowy specks, crawling high in the air, swung into place five thou sand tons of cable. So high in the air hang those great ropes, so airy and fragile in outline are those towers that no person gazing upward from the riv- CT or shore can realize the dimensions of everything connected with the giant swing. It is only when one is upon the structure itself that the true proportion of the aerial roadway and the tremen- dous danger of the builders become ap- parent.
 Six days in every seven an army of men have ignored danger in balancing themselves on the heights with their lives in their hands. They have done this for wages not more than sufficient to maintain themselves and their fami- lies-and they have done it so long that their eyes have become used to the peril. Only when one of them over balances and with trailing cry plunges into the air and water below are those builders made aware of their danger long enough to entertain momentary sickening fear that passes away almost as soon as it comes and leaves them on the heights.
 Taking a cab at the bridge, the con- noisseur in dangerous modes of liveli- hood, while driving to the City Hall Park subway entrance, may consider the life of the cabman on the box. Day and night, in rain or sunshine, wet to the skin, or dry as fever. the cabman pursues his trade. Constant exposure and irregular hours render him prema- turely old by slowly and surely sapping his vitality. They generally die at the rate of 1,4S2, as against one thousand of the male population in the normal lines of trade.
 Arriving at the subway and descend- ing into it's cavernous jaws, as did a writer for the Times yesterday in com pany with one of the subway contrac- tors, one can reflect while traversing the underground routes from the' City Hall to Harlem that there has been a victim for every square of ground above our remarkable tunnel. This has in no wise been due to the negligence or any fault on the part of the contrac- tors, for extraordinary precautions have been taken to protect property as we'll as life while the giant mole has been borrowing under the half million homes on Manhattan Island. Perhaps the wonder is that more tragedies have not marked the progress of the subway since it's genesis, and yet when, as Con- tractor John B. Mcdonald promises, the subway is thrown open for business. on September I it will have claimed an appalling number of victims-victims SimnIv of A dangerous trade The Park avenue tragedy is too recent to need re- calling. It suffices to say that this dangerous stage may be illuminated by a flare of powder or shaken by a blast of dynamite at any moment and the actors as well as spectators blown away. Of course the humble actors are the toilers who prepare and fire the ex- plosives. These players are never ap- plauded. But when an accident is caused by an unsteady eye or hand they are hissed and even driven from the stage of labor.
 Coney Island visitors passing through Homecrest and Brighton Beach may notice every day number of tin cov- cred box houses midway between the two places. Within those queer look ing sheds are made tons of fireworks every year, of which most are for use in the Pain spectacular productions Every now and then something goes wrong-a misplaced fuse or a lighted cigar thrown into a powder can by q careless workman-and then the deaths that turk in powder flare up in staring nnwc headlines