Page:The truth about the railroads (IA truthaboutrailro00elli).pdf/271

the causes of our homicides. Every day of the year murders are committed somewhere in the United States. Many have tried to point out the reason. It is probable that several factors rather than one are responsible, and that they may be summed up in the laxity of public opinion and the consequent laxity of law and its administration. For this death-roll every individual of the American people should feel a responsibility. It is the lack of such public opinion that caused the Indiana Railroad Commission to make this sad comment in its accident bulletin issued in March, 1910: “Trespassers continue to pay the usual toll in blood for the fatal right to make thoroughfares of the railroads. If the railroad ties were three times as many, and were saturated with oil and burning all the time; if dynamite were placed on the track every ten feet, and people walked on the tracks, nevertheless the deaths would be no more certain than in a country whose laws do not prohibit such use of the tracks, and whose customs and carelessness of human life permit these astounding fatalities.”