ssing, without repentance, that his committee for one reason or
another ignored the recommendations made by the Board of Trade for the
general safety, I marvel that the public never rise up and demand that
a railway director shall be hanged. I have small belief in capital
punishment, but if capital punishment must still be permitted in order
to add a spice to the lives of newspaper readers, then I should
confine it to railway directors and other magnates who, though they
never commit a murder privately for the delight of the thing, still
run a system of murder far more sensational in results than any that
was ever planned by French motor-bandits. Think of all the railway
accidents of recent times--the accidents of every day to the men on
the line, and the accidents of red-letter days to us of the general
public. There have been so many of these lately that even the most
stupid devotees of private ownership are beginning to think that
somebody must be responsible; and if somebody is responsible, then in
a society which resorts to penal measures somebody deserves
punishment. It is ridiculous to send weak-minded women to gaol for
borrowing knicknacks off a shop counter while you send strong-minded
railway directors to Belgravia and Mayfair for maintaining a system of
sudden death for workmen and travellers. In the days of the Irish
famine, coroners' juries, whose business it was to report on the death
of some starved man, used to bring in a verdict of wilful murder
against Lord John Russell. Is there no coroner's jury of the present
day to bring in an occasional verdict of wilful murder against the
directors of a railway or a factory? When we see a railway manager
sentenced to seven years' penal servitude as the reasonable
consequence of some disaster on the line, I have an idea that the
number of railway accidents will diminish. When we see the directors
of a shipping company fined a year's income and a captain dismissed
from his post for sending a ship full steam ahead through a fog, we
shall be thrilled by fewer accidents at sea. But it is the old story.
One's crime has only to be on a sufficiently grand scale to be as far
above punishment as an act of God. What punishment can be too severe
for a half-witted farm hand who burns his master's haystack? But as
for the railway lords who burn a score of men, women and children in
the course of a railway smash by their carefully calculated
carelessness, why, one might as well