The Sun. — 1863-01-01 (London, England)

HERALD.—The conclusion of the country jury who, on an indictment for assault, found the prisoner " guilty," with the appendix " served him right," is pretty faithfully reproduced in the verdict of the jurors who sat upon the bodies killed by the explosion of the Edmund's Main Colliery. They find that " they are unable to attach blame to any individual" for " the immediate deaths" of the vic tires, and then go on to express " the unanimous opinion that the cause of the explosion was the incautious and unsafe working of the dipboard of the colliery," with the addition that " the mode of blasting with powder was highly injudicious, and ought not to have been allowed by the under viewer." They find, in fact, that everything was nearly as bad as it could be ; that the deaths were made as nearly as possible inevitable by the character of the management ; and then, with that courtesy that befits even so short an official life as that of a juryman, smoothe down everything with the saving clause, "of course nobody is to blame for it." It is, however, a redeeming feature in jury history that there was found one in the number, a Mr. E. Parker, to protest against so nonsensical an attempt to reconcile duty to the public with pretty phrases to everybody; and no one who has read the evidence can doubt that the gentleman had excellent grounds for the independent position he thus assumed. We hardly knows indeed, in the whole history of colliery disasters, an instance in which a heavier culpability lies at the doors either of managers or of their workmen. There was a reckless negligence and foolhardiness displayed by both actually incredible did we not know the facility with which ignorant men gradually learn to reconcile themselves after a time to positions of the greatest danger. Here the mine was well known to be an unusually dangerous one, the whole district being notorious in colliery records for the number and calamitous character of its explosions. But for some time past the stimulus of high prices which has severely tasked the powers of production in coal-mining generally, has acted here with an almost exceptional force, and the management, not content) by the payment of a respectable bonus, with securing the services of successive gangs of miners who keep working night and day, increased the celerity of the excavations by resorting to blast ings by gunpowder. In other words, they did their best to accumulate gas in quantities disproportioned to their powers of tietitralising it, at the same time that they were busy in applying the spark Whioli might at any minute explode it. Everybody knows that the disaster at the Hartley Colliery was the unpardonable result of trusting to a massive cast iron beam after it had given unmistakeable evidence of unsoundness. At the Edmund's Main Colliery we had an incompetent under viewer in charge of between two and three hundred lives, and sacrificing some shay of them, with his own, through a toying with danger as needless as it was systematic and foolhardy. We are unable, indeed, to understand how such risks can be daily incurred, if we accept the hypothesis that inspectors of mines are charged with duties or invested with powers. What are they for if they can interpose no veto on a system of incurring risks which is only another word for a system of committing felo de set They are presumed by their appointments to be capable of thinking for the miners—it is surely not over-exacting to ask the correlative, that they should act for them. But another inference that springs out of the needless and wanton immolations of useful workmen we are periodically experiencing points to the urgency of giving every class of miners a better and more  scientific knowledge of the nature and dangers of their pursuits. We want such an extension in the number and working of our mining colleges that we may be able to indoctrinate these men with the  general principles of safe mining, and secure our having those competent men as viewers and superintendents through whose ignorance so many of these accidents are now occurring. It is high  time, indeed, that we should set about saving the annual thousand of useful men we are now losing as the result of our indifferent teaching and inefficient law-making.