The open street car is in its mid-career for 1888, and the fiend of the
whistler is on the vertex of successful practice. The stranglers of the
Orient were an occasional incident in that sunburnt civilization as
compared with the death-dealing, pestilential prevalence of the Brooklyn
open street-car conductor, literally “armed to the teeth” with his
offensive weapon, out of whose depths, impelled by æolic volumes from
jerky and gigantic costo-diaphragmatic spasms, issue the ear-splitting
and nerve-rending combination of fog-horn and prolonged rifle-crack.
From stable to terminus and back, circulating along the outer step,
holding on to the uprights with extended arms, facing forever the
five-cent and helpless “fares,” two to four inches of potential reed or
metal protruding from his embracing lips, like an ill-placed proboscis
on a witless pachyderm, he summons the driver to screw up his brake and
arrest his sportive team for a fare to unload, or to reverse the process
for the temporary torture of more victims in hoisting in of other
patrons of the line, and the shrill horror of his whistling signal,
right in the faces of the passengers, is made more agonizing by the
uncertainty of when and on whom it will discharge its blast, being
forever ready for action, like the lance in rest of the jousting knight.
It would be easy to aim this calliope at the curbstone or the empyrean,
but this regard for the passengers’ tympanum disturbeth not the peaceful
slumber of the tramway directory, whose shibboleth is the Vanderbilt
curse of “the public be ——.” But sadder than the disregard of
common-carriers for public comfort is the unearthed conspiracy of the
otologists with the ill-paid conductors on the horse-cars. For some
years this specialty throve on the otitis acquired at the bathing-houses
at Rockaway and Coney Island, but the public discovered that a little
cotton in the meatus was the needful prophylactic, and otitis, as a
source of revenue, dwindled to the starvation point. Again, and for a
time, the horn of plenty overflows in the otologist’s operating room,
and his commissions to the car conductors promise to put them soon on a
plane with the diamond-bedecked shirt-fronts of the average hotel clerk.
It was said that so possessed was a certain London specialist with the
operation of tonsillotomy that these amputated glands were each morning
shoveled out of his office by the basketful. There are compensations all
through life, and the hordes of cash boys, whose occupation vanished
with the introduction of mechanical carriers into the great dry good
bazaars, now find ample and continuous employment in sweeping out the
heaped up fragments of shattered ear drums from the infirmaries of
otological specialists. Verily, this deal among the ear men with the
whistling open car conductors for the embezzlement of the community
deserves the most summary and high-handed reprobation. There is but the
faintest justification for such combination in the new code, but even
that cannot fairly be pleaded when the integrity of the community’s ear
is imperilled. A proper corps d’esprit would impel to the conservation
of a professional brother’s prosperity, but even that laudable sentiment
must have subordinate place when the profession at large, who are the
conservators of society, see that society is likely to turn a deaf ear
to the varied forms of human plaint, and all owing to the men who can
neither stop or start an open car of a horse railroad without blowing
out the ear drums of the community. The public is in peril and who shall
be the Curtius to jump into the breach. The conductor cannot be appealed
to. He is insensitive, and, besides, he is in authority. One cannot
knock the beastly clarion from his lips’ embrace: there would be the
claim for assault and ejection for disorder. The directors are a weak
reed; they dread a strike. Municipal ordinance would be vainly sought:
workingmen have a union and votes. The police, even the finest, are not
open to bribery: they are at home in a brawl, and noise is their normal
condition of repose. The profession must interfere. Henceforth let the
cry be “boycott the whistle.” If it must exist, let the instruction be
boldly posted at the starter’s office: “Conductors must aim their
whistles at the curbstones and not in the ears of the passengers.”