New Britain herald., 1916-08-23

coordination which he found in Ger many before the war, he wrote: "I had sailed away from skyscrapers and limited expresses from farmers sow ing crops wastefully; from houses burned through Care1essness; from forests burned through carelessness; from heaps of fruit rotting on the ground in one place and hundreds of men hungry in another place." It is not pretty picture, and it's ugliness is not lessened by being placed beside the picture of almost any other coun- try on the globe
 CarelessneSs is one of our most con- spicuous traits. It appears in virtually everything we do. The tendency to take risks is more deserving of the pen of the foreign cartoonist than the greed for gold which he so delights to carlcature as the chief element in the American character. Our railways street cars and in fact every form of transportation afford unansWerable evidences of it. Traction companies are at their Wits end to devise and en- force regulations which shall compel passengers to take proper preca utiOns for the protection of their lives and limbs. Boarding cars while they are in motion is so common a practice and we are so unwilling tO walt a minute longer than we must that only stran- ger would have been surprised at an amazing performance which followed the conclusion of polo game year or two ago when the long trains, slow ly pulling past the edge of the grounds, one after another, on their way to a station a few hundred feet distant, were leaped upon by numbers of men, who in many instances first lifted their fair companions from the rather low ground to the moving steps, When the guards closed the vest ibules in order to discourage the movement people Jumped into the windows and wriggled through. The danger was greatly intensified by the jostling of the crowd, which threat ened to push those near the tracks against the passing train.
 The results of the endeavOrs of cer- tain railways to decrease the number of autom obile accidents are eloquent of our instinct for putting safety last. Special warnings, given both by con- spicuous notices at railway crossings and large newspaper advertisements, have been met by demands from auto mobilists to the gateman to raise the gates and let the driver show him that there is no danger. Gates are tre- ouently ridden through and smashed as if they were an impertinence 1n- stead of a safeguard. It is easy to De- lieve the story of the motorcyclist who, recovering consciousness after col lision with a locomotive, exclaimed Tn an injured tone: Why, I blew my horn!" Pedestrians are equally in ststent upon their right to be manned Or killed. The real task of the traffic policeman is not to "direct traffic, but to drag hurrying men and women out from under the heels of horses or the wheels of motor cars.
 Our national bill for fires has long been one of the wonders of the world. How large @ part carelessness plays in them is indicated by every report of an investigation or of an insurance com pany. The single habit of flinging cigarette stub or a lighted match in the general direction of the curb IS known by everybody to be the Imme- diate cause of great numbers Of hres, large and small: yet we go on doing it. The lighning and even the smok- ing of cigars and cigarettes on ele- vated station platforms is by no means unknown, despite the rule aga1nSt It, But the picture is not altogether black Nothing could have seemed much more hopeless in its beginning than the agitation for new kind of Fourth of July. It was a challenge, not merely to our disinclinatton to take precautions, but also to what had come to be regarded as part of our patriotic sentiment. Our calamity list for one day has been vastly re- duced. What we have done for this one occasion we can do upon larger scale. But we shall have to give up the childish idea that liberty means freedom to disregard consequences.