The Express. — 1867-01-16 (London, England)

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 encroachments and assaults upon their public and private liberty. On Monday last, according to the newspaper 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 immersed ; 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 attraction 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 common 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 direction 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