The Manchester Examiner. — 1848-09-23 (Manchester, Greater Manchester, England)

NATION OF TRAVELLERS.—The number of passengers, according to the return recently published, who have travelled by railway during the half-year ending on the 30th June last, amounted to 26,330,492—which is just about the population of England, Scotland, and Ireland—and some idea may hence be formed of the tide of human beings who have passed over the country, as Mr. Locke says, "by means of two parallel pieces of iron, when we reflect that the official numbers actually represent the transmission of every man, woman, and child in the United Kingdom, a certain distance, within the short period of six months, at a speed previously unattainable, and with a reduction of danger, considering the mass of human beings thus transferred, almost infinitesimal. Archimides is recorded to have said, if he had standing ground he could move the globe; and though our modern engineers have not exactly attempted to work out that problem, they have satisfactorily solved another, which a few short years since would almost have been thought as visionary. The number of accidents figure as 189; ninety resulted in death, and ninety• nine in injuries more or less severe. Of passengers, six unfortunates were killed and sixty hurt from no fault of their own,—a wonderfully small proportion when we consider the enormous aggregate who now use this mode of locomotion; the remainder of the casualties is made up from accidents to railway servants, labourers on the lines in construction, and persons who have taken this novel mode of committing suicide, by precipitating themselves from trains or into their way, but who, in fact, have as much to do with the safety of railway travelling as a man blowing out his brains has to do with the safety of fire-arms. Of the accidents to those regularly employed by the companies, a large proportion seems to have arisen from the carelessness of the men themselves, and we have no data as to the percentage, nor of the labourers; but, when the nature of their work is taken into account, we are surprised that there have not been more deaths, and we have little doubt that many other employments would give a much higher rate of mortality and mutilation than railways, and it must also be recollected that, when finished, a great cause of damage is at once cut off, which just now, whilst so many are employed on the lines in construction, must largely increase the average. We make these remarks without any,-'wish for concealment of the number of accidents, , and merely to call public attention to the real state of a question all are interested in; we urge no relaxation of any precaution that can tend to preserve life and limb, but when railways and their directors are held up as a sort of public executioners, it becomes our duty to place the matter in its true light, and we boldly assert that the statement from which our figures are taken is a wonderful evidence of the comparative safety with which one million of people shift from town to town and from village to village every week, or, to bring the numbers to lower denominations, a host of 144,000 souls is daily on the move.--Railtvay Chronicle.