life a day is sacrificed to one of the two idols, Obstinacy and Indifference. In Durham, where the collier is son, grandson, and great-grandson, to a collier, with a line of mining ancestry, although the nature of the coal is more than ordinarily dangerous, accidents are comparatively few. In the midland counties, where many of the miners come as strangers to the work, accidents are more numerous; so you see how it is! say the defenders of what is. We do see how it is. In the northern districts, where the miners have coal in their very blood, they are not left to take care of themselves. About one man in every six is employed, not in coal-getting, but in superintending ventilation, keeping up roads, setting timber, removing obstructions, and attending generally to what is necessary to safety. In most other parts of the country, colliers are expected to do these things for themselves. The annual loss of a hundred and twenty-six lives in these districts, beyond the standard of the naturally more dangerous collieries of the north, is justified by the fact that the men are less up to their work, and maintained by the fact that if they be twice as much in need of being minded, they are only half as much helped and looked after. ventor, Mr. Bailey, is a practical mining engineer at Wednesbury, but comparatively little use has been made of his invention. When the British Association met in Birmingham, a gentleman advertised that he would exhibit a contrivance to prevent the sudden running down of the cage with the men. Persons of almost every profession went to look at it, and expressed their high approval of it, but not a single coal-owner or manager of mines went to see it. Was it not something "new fangled," and were not coal-owners already spending money enough upon their pits? So, the old sorts of accidents go on as in the old way, and in the mere entrance shaft, in which the men spend only the smallest fraction of their time, one-fifth of all the deaths by violence occur. The statements we here make, are mainly founded on the substance of a paper and discussion on the subject of accidents in coal-mines, read and held at the Society of Arts not many weeks ago. The paper was by P. H. Holland. The discussion, fairly representing arguments on both sides of the question, was supported chiefly by Mr. Edwin Chadwick, Mr. Robert Hunt, Mr. John Hedley, and Mr. Robert Rawlinson. The writer of this little summary, compiles from An explosion is a terrible thing when, as at what he has read, under a deep impression of its Sandhill, it kills at a blow nearly two hundred harmony with all that he has seen and known men, makes ninety widows, deprives more than during years spent in attendance on the sick two hundred children of the fathers who put and wounded miners of a midland district. When bread into their mouths. But the miners are one has felt every week the grating of a bone not killed by explosions chiefly. Even more carelessly broken; when one has heard the wail men are crushed by the fall of coal upon their of the widow in whose little cottage lie the heads, for want of sufficient care in setting up corpses of her husband and her two stoutprops to support it as the miners push forward hearted sons, who passed the threshold in the their excavations. The average number of annual morning, hale and noisy, to be carried back deaths by explosion is two hundred and forty-eight, over it, ice-cold, and pale, and silent, before the by falls of the roof, three hundred and seventy-hour when their daily labour should end, and so one-more than a man a day through the year. long before the hour when their life labour Another kind of accident, killing in some years should have closed; when one has become famore men than are killed by explosion, and on miliar with the sight of young bodies flayed an average within thirty of the number, would alive by the scorch of fire-damp, painfully awaitbe most disgraceful to the science of our engi-ing death; and when one knows that nearly neers, if it were not true that it is almost wholly preventable. This is the class of accidents in shafts. Large as the recorded number is, we have reason to doubt whether it includes all that happen. Arms and legs are daily broken, and at least four lives are lost every week by accidents upon the threshold of their work. Men are killed by the falling of stone or coal over the edge of the pit mouth upon them as they ascend or descend in baskets unprotected by the caging that would save them altogether from this kind of risk. Men are thrown to the bottom out of baskets that would rarely be dangerous if they were caged and supplied with proper guide-rods. For want of proper indicators, signals, and breaks, and the undivided attention of the engine-driver, men are drawn over the pulleys. A safety skip has been invented, simple in construction, so arranged that the rope is inevitably detached before the cage reaches the pulley, and the cage supported at the place it has reached. Its in half this suffering exists only because it has existed heretofore, and men are slow to change the worst of ways when once it has become a settled way; it is no longer easy placidly to accept the huge class of Preventable Accidents as part of the common lot of man. In the first days of our penal colonisation, there was in the transport ships for the conveyance of convicts, a most frightful amount of preventable death. Fifty, and even sixty per cent of those who embarked alive, would be dead at the end of a voyage. There were complaints, inquiries, promises, and good intentions. The skippers could point out the recklessness of sailors who shut hatches down and exclude necessary air, or will not maintain cleanliness; it was hard to prevent greedy ship captains from pressing on the space available for passengers, by taking an excess of cargo. There was, however, effort enough made to reduce the mortality upon the voyage out, to a third or a fourth part of all the convicts shipped. At last it occurred to somebody to change the form of contract with the shipowners, and pay-not for the number of men embarked, but for the number landed alive. Losses were, of course, fairly considered in the bargain, but, the bargain made, every life saved was money gained, every life lost was money lost. The shippers at once appointed medical officers to see to the health of the convict passengers, and the amount of their payment from the owners was also made to depend upon the number of lives saved. The deaths presently fell from one in ten to one in forty-six, and at last came to be only one and a half in a hundred, showing a better state of health than the same class of men would have enjoyed at home. Wherever the same principle has been applied to emigrant ships, it has been pleasant, says Mr. Chadwick, its chief advocate, to see shippers cutting holes for ventilation, and considering their space with a devout regard for sanitary laws. works in which he had no business to be, while there incautiously placed his hand upon a pilehead that was being driven, and so got it crushed. The French law made his employer responsible for compensation, and there was no injustice felt. The educated man is answerable for the ignorant; employer and employed are saved all risk of litigation. The employer's liability is fixed, reducible to calculation, and may be met by a proportionate insurance charge to be reckoned among the expenses of his business. In the case of collieries, an additional charge of a penny on the ton of coal would be enough to meet the heavy average expense of compensation to the wounded and the widow. But what would be the natural effect of such a system in the working? We may judge from the experience of fire-offices. In Manchester the blowing engine for cleaning cotton used to be in the factory building. Fire-offices required The men who receive truths from without, for this arrangement extra premium of insurcoming as mere information and advice, with ance, and the blowing engines are now all in' obstinacy or indifference, give their minds to detached buildings. Cotton waste, liable when them actively when they become questions of in heaps to ignite spontaneously, would vitiate income. If they are to be judged for it, we a policy if kept in the factory. Owners are very know not who will dare to cast the stone. strict in causing it to be removed. Some years Owners under whom preventable accidents con- ago, two very destructive fires occurred in Manstantly occur, are very often generous and kind chester. One, spread in consequence of the men, looked up to with a well-grounded affection warehouse being lined with wood paneling; the by all their dependents. Accidents, when they other, from fire being communicated to an outare of any magnitude, do, as the case now stands, side wooden cornice. The companies agreed to' affect the owner's pocket very seriously; but charge extra premium for insurance in such then they are, until they occur, future and cases, and in a year scarcely one wooden exhypothetical losses, that weigh little in the ternal cornice or wooden lining to a warehouse balance against present certain gain by dan- meant to contain valuable property, was to be gerous economy or over-greedy haste in holing. found. In the same manner, companies insurThere is Lord Campbell's Act, too, which en- ing against accidents in collieries, suspected of forces compensation for an accidental injury no maudlin philanthropy," would tax most from any man by whose neglect it has been heavily the pits in which there was least precaused. But the proximate cause of an accident caution against loss of life, would require extra in a mine, is commonly a miner; it is but seldom premium for each cause of danger, and would that direct responsibility can be traced to the make void a policy for the infringement of its owner; and if it can, how is a miner's widow, own wholesome conditions. It would be every living upon half-a-crown-a-week parish allow-owner's interest to qualify for insurance at the ance, to assert her claim in a law court against lowest premium by using all the fair precautions one of the wealthiest men in the county? against accident. Probably the true remedy, not only in the In the case of the safety-lamps, for example, case of accidents in coal-mines, but in the case of it is said that the men will open them and use all accidents, preventable or inevitable, is to the naked light. But the great northern disadopt the plan that works perfectly well in trict, in which there is especial risk from France, and to require every employer to com- fire-damp, contributes only twenty-one out of pensate the sufferer, or the representative of the two hundred and forty-eight annual deaths one who has been killed in his service, without from explosion. As much care taken everywhere any consideration of whose fault may have occa- as they take in the north, would have saved, upon sioned the misfortune. The working of the this item alone, a thousand lives during the last general rule is far less grievous than the work- eight years. Safety-lamps may be locked. There ing of Lord Campbell's Act. In combination is a kind of safety-lamp also that cannot be opened with a free system of insurance by employers without at the same time extinguishing the light. against accident to those in his employ-the cost One inspector reports that of a hundred and being covered by a very minute additional seventy-two deaths by explosion in his district, charge on their productions-such a system a hundred and seventy-one were attributed to would press on none but those who were the use of naked lights, and that out of eleven found by insurance-offices to pass beyond the hundred and fifty-four such deaths reported in average of risk in conduct of their business. A five years, twelve only occurred where safetyGerman labourer in France, employed in driving lamps had been used, all of which were defective. piles, left his own gang, went to a part of the Another inspector says that "out of one thou sand and ninety-nine deaths, seven only were with safety-lamps," and adds that "no instance has been properly authenticated of explosion from a proper safety-lamp; and in the most dangerous mines of England, where the discharge of firedamp is greatest, but where locked safety-lamps are exclusively used, explosions are almost un known." GETTING UP EARLY. THE human race has, at various periods, been subject to delusions, more or less widely spread, more or less enthusiastically accepted, more or less extended in their duration. But, taking all these into consideration, from Mahommedanism, or the worship of the sun, or of Odin, down to that form of idolatry prevalent in the present day, which, like a monomania, attacks otherwise tolerably sane people, and causes them to adore hideous canine or gallinaceous monsters called Skye terriers and Cochin-China fowls, there has been no delusion, I take it, so general and so lasting as that respecting early rising. I was, at a very early age, theoretically and practically opposed to this strange and dangerous doctrine; and a long experience of its effects has caused an ineradicable conviction against it, where formerly there only existed an instinct. Insects are early risers, so are birds, so are beasts (those whose intelligences have been improved by domesticity, less so, generally speaking; than wild beasts), savages, children whose physical is much ahead of their mental development, manual labourers who are similarly situated,-all these rise "with the lark," go forth when damp and miasma are rife, pass through a day of restless activity that it is fatiguing even to witness, and then, when the calm and beauteous and thoughtful evening arrives, are stupified and stultified with an offensive somnolence. It has been my fate to mix much with and know something of, the habits of a large number of the noteworthy men and women of the day, and at this moment I can only call to mind one such being who, from choice (doubtless some are driven to it by necessity), is an early riser, and of course one must make allowance for the eccentricities of genius. Let us take early rising in the country; that is, early rising at its best. Overnight it has been agreed, for some cause or reason unnecessary here to dwell upon, that I am to get up early. I go to bed with those dreadful words haunting me, howling in my ears like Old Dog Tray, casting a gloom over my spirit that no words can describe, keeping me in the shrinking condition of a new Damocles, with the addition to my misery that I know my fate to be inevitable, that I have no hope whatever that the hair won't break, that I have the certainty that the sword, after hanging over my devoted head all through the black and ghastly night, will most positively fall on me at a certain hour in the dreaded morning. I am not, however, given to make the worst of things, so I say to myself, "You must make haste and go to bed, and you must get to sleep in good time, because you know you have to get up early!" So I begin to undress with uncomfortable haste, having given myself only three-quarters of an hour by the clock on my bedroom mantelpiece to get to bed in, instead of my usual dear dawdling hour and a half. And yet, in these wretched three-quarters, I have much more to do than usual, for I must put everything in readiness for the morrow: knowing if I don't, how additionally hopeless, and helpless, and desperate I shall be in the morning. Ah, there you are on the shelf, Keats (I'm sure the man who wrote the Ode to the Nightingale couldn't have been an early riser; an early riser must have been snoring when the Night, Cluster'd around by all her starry rays, inspired him with that divinest song), but I anything like ready for bed. Beloved Keats, you Regal his shape majestic, a vast shade In midst of his own brightness. Where is it that I have come across a line or two very like those? I know I've seen them somewhere: the self-same image, expressed much in the same manner. Is it in Milton? It sounds sufficiently Miltonic; mightn't it be in some of the angel passages in Paradise Lost? I'll see. See, ay-pass an hour-two hours-hunting for what I may not be able to find after all, when I've got to get up early! It's of no use; I tear off what remains of my day clothing, rush about my room (I have already been more than an hour “getting to bed"), complete my preparations for the morrow, plunge in a mixture of rage and sulks between the sheets, cover myself up, and resolutely set myself to the task of going to sleep. I close my eyes very tight; I try laboriously, one after another, all the expedients I have ever heard mentioned, or have ever attempted with any shadow of success, to produce on the instant healthy and refreshing sleep. I think of a flock of sheep leaping one by one over a hurdle; I think of falling water, of waving corn, of wind in trees; still somehow or other my mind won't stick to these ideas continuously, but will go wandering off to certain remembered scenes and sounds suggested by such images. Then I try to do what I never was able to do in my life-repeat the multiplication-table all through, and dodge myself in it. I stick at seven times eight, and go back to the beginning, and get more puzzled and less sleepy every minute. Clearly all these are fallacies; let me try, mental devices having failed, if there is anything to be done by attacking the physical condition. Somebody, I think, told me, at some time or other, that drinking a glass of cold water was efficacious in cases of insomnolence. I hate water administered internally, but I'll try it; I'll try anything; I can't be worse; and, as nepenthe is not to be had, give me water. Bah! Tepid! Standing all the summer day in the room, it is like drinking liquefied swansdown, or any soft, warm, tasteless, sliding thing that gives no marked sensation of any kind to the palate. Well, it's gone, and I go back to bed, and beat up the pillows, and place them (as somebody else, at some other time, has advised), not under the head only, but under the neck and shoulders too, and again I shut up my eyes tighter than before, and set to work to make my mind a total blank--to exclude all ideas, feelings, recollections, and impressions whatsoever. Regal his shape majestic, a vast shade. Oh, Keats, Keats! Gracious powers, Keats! have you forgotten that I have to get up early? Regal his shape majestic I must find out where the line is, or where lines like that, are, if I die for it. I get up and take Milton from the shelf, and begin turning over the pages of Paradise Lost by the night-light, but somehow I feel it isn't there. Well, then, where is it? That's the next question. Shakespeare? Pooh, nonsense! not a bit like Shakespeare. Dante? No, it's not Dante. Spenser? Ah, may be! I think it is Spenser. I seize The Faerie Queene with the vigour of hope, and turn from canto to canto. I have it!- And hid in his own brightness. Rather like it? Some of these days I mean to publish a chapter or two on plagiaries, wilful or accidental. Well, well, never mind now; you've satisfied yourself on that point, so do go to bed, for you know you have to get up early. So I go to bed again; but going to sleep is quite a different thing, and I never felt further from it in my life. Turn how I will, lie how I may, the one thought that I have to get up early, is ever before me, and as the night waxes and wanes, and I know the dreaded hour draws near and more near, I am worked up into the state of desperation that you sometimes see in nursing mothers when they can't get their babes to sleep a state which induces them to try to do it by force, and makes them carry the refractory imp up and down the room in a frenzied manner, and rock it violently in their arms, and sing aloud to deaden its shricking. At last is it possible? yes I am losing the clearness of my perceptions-that last thought was very dreamy. I don't recollect the train of ideas that led to it; I was very nearly asleep. I am so glad that in my joy I wake up broad, broad, and find that day is breaking, And I have not slumbered yet; and, slumber or no slumber, I have to get up early. At last, towards five o'clock-I am to rise at six-I go off into a profound, balmy, dreamless, perfect sleep, and am buried deep, deep in the downy bosom of the delicious goddess-I know Sleep was a goddess--the notion of any influence so sweet, and soothing, and loving, and tender being masculine!--when at my room I hear the hot water and the announcement-twice delivered Just gone six." 66 I start up in bed and gaze about me blankly. "Gone six," indeed! and what's that to me? How dare that woman-how dare anybodycome to my door and wake me with the terrific statement that it has " gone six," when everybody knows that I never dream of allowing myself to be disturbed before half-past eight, in order that I may have time to get wide awake by a quarter to nine? Suddenly, however, the sense of my calamity bursts upon me with overwhelming force, and I, blind and drunk with sleep, blunder out of bed, into the middle of the room, and stand there for a moment dazed, bewildered, striving to collect my senses, and think what I am to do next. A bright idea strikes me. I will reverse the order of my ablutions, and instead of keeping my bath for their crowning joy and glory, I'll take it first. Br-r-r-how cold it is! Not laving me with a gently stimulating freshness, not lending me new life and vigour, as it is wont to do, but striking into my very vitals with a sudden shock of cold. Well, it has wakened me, at all events. Let us see what the morning looks like. Ah! fine, I sce; sunshiny-a very pretty sight, indeed, to go back to bed and dream about. But I can't go back to bed; I must go on with my dressing, for am I not getting up early? Water, instead of screeching hot, tepid-just one degree warmer than that I drank last night. Ha, pleasant-hot cold water, and cold hot water! Well, well, it's no use to grumble: once having made up your mind to get up early, you must make your ac count for every possible discomfort that can be heaped on your devoted head. Well, now I am dressed, and what next awaits me? To think that I, who am wont to make my appearance in the breakfast-room at what hour it suits me, in what costume it suits me, in what mood it suits me, sure to find some little dainty dish prepared for me, crisp watercress, nice bread-and-butter, hot tea-I, accustomed for years to this mode of preparing for the labours of the day, am now, in full morning dress, to sally forth at half-past seven, and to walk three miles before breakfast! I go down stairs; the shutters in the hall are not taken down; I grope along in darkness, It is over, and I am back again-back in bring my shin in contact with some hard-edged object, and tumble prone over what proves to be a coal-scuttle. How it came there in July, I want to know; but there it is, and there am I, and after sprawling some moments among the coals, I get up, rub my smarting shin, brush off as much coal-dust as consents to be removed, and, casting a glance as I pass at the "banquethall deserted," which last night looked the picture of harmless conviviality, and which this morning looks the picture of disreputable sickly revolting dissipation, I open the door and pass out. Cold again; that same searching cold that chilled me through and through in my bath: I wish I had put on something warmer; but if I had, I should be roasted before I got back! Look at those mists, lying asleep in the valley, or just awake enough to Put forth an arm, and creep from pine to pine, Don't I know what is in those mists: haven't Lovely morning!" says the voice of my friend who is to accompany me, and who has just joined me- glorious morning!" I used to think my friend had a chcery, pleasant voice; I never before detected anything insulting or derisive in it; now, it sounds envenomed: the more galling that it seeks to hide itself beneath an appearance of the frankest bonhomie. I assent. What's the good of arguing the point? Are you not glad you got up?" This is a little too much. Luckily, I am saved from quarrelling with my friend (which I should be sorry to be obliged to do) by the appearance of Rover and Stella, who have been let off the chain to accompany us. They are nice dogs, and I am proud of them, when dry and calm, as they are in the middle of the day; but now, what use do they make of their newly gained liberty? They roll themselves on the lawn, among the dew and the wormcasts, till they are soaking, and then they come, plunging, in loud wide-mouthed boisterousness, to leap on me, completing the effect of the coal-dust on my light-coloured summer costume. Off we go, across wet fields that soak my boots through in the first five minutes, my friend striding along, singing, whistling, and talking to the dogs, I following, sick, silent, and savage, till my tormentor turns round, and remarks that "I seem out of sorts." I Grin horrible a ghastly smile by way of answer, for speak I cannot. my room-I will not now stop to state in what condition of mind, body, or attire-back in my untidy and disordered room, everything at sixes and sevens just as I left it, and I have to set to to polish myself up for breakfast, and my boots are sodden with wet, and my stockings won't come off, except with tearing, and there's the breakfast-bell, and I'm not ready; no, nor anything the least like it, nor shall I be for the next half-hour at least, and, what's more, I shall not try to be. Three-quarters of an hour later I make my appearance at the breakfast-table, to find cold tea, and tough sodden toast, and eggs that-and ham which- -it doesn't signify, for I am much too sick and wretched to eat any of them, were they of the best. But here the recollection of what next occurred still awakes in me sentiments I would rather not recal. I found that, instead of meeting with that soothing sympathy and tender consideration which my prolonged sufferings and exacerbated feelings demanded, I was made the subject of general mirth; that my friend had been amusing the assembled company with a highlycoloured facetious account of all I had endured in that dreadful, dreadful walk. And, can it be believed, that the hours of agony I had gone through in the night were made the subject, not only of comment, but of complaint, by a woman would do me an injury if the occasion served her, (I always hated that woman-I always felt she and I was right) who had not been obliged to leave her bed before nine o'clock! "No wonder," she said-I see her red face now, and her projecting teeth and gums, from which the lips used to recede when she spoke or smiled, leaving them exposed in all their native hideousness-"no wonder you were unfit for an early walk, for I'm sure you were up half the night. I heard you over my head half a dozen times at least"-the reader will remember I only rose on two occasions-" and you woke me cach time. I had a mind to take my umbrella and stand on a chair and tap on the ceiling to you." It was lucky you didn't, I thought-unIf you had, I commonly lucky you didn't. should have overthrown every heavy article the room contained. I should have put on the thickest and most creaking boots I had, and paced to and fro at intervals all through the night. It would have been a relief to my feelings to have tortured you, that I only regret you did not suggest it by acting as you proposed. I will not go through an account of the berous, stupified evening that followed that, weary, listless, interminable day; of the slumin which I fell asleep in the midst of the delightful discourse of my dear old friend, arrived from town only just before dinner. I will not say how I struggled to listen; how I pulled up my eyelids by elevating my eyebrows to the utmost height, and fixed my eyes with a wideopen stare on the opposite wall; how I found |