A SAVIOUR OF HUMAN LIFE.
While Carleton enjoyed that kind of work, ethical, literary,
benevolent, and political, which appealed to sentiment and aroused
sympathy to the burning point, he was an equally faithful coworker
with God and man in enterprises wholly unsentimental. He who waits
through eternity for his creatures to understand his own creation,
knows how faithfully good men can cooeperate with him in plans which
only unborn and succeeding generations can appreciate.
Out of a thousand illustrations we may note, along the lines of
electric science, the names of Professor Kinnersly, who probably first
led Franklin into that line of research which enabled him to "snatch
the sceptre from tyrants and the lightning from heaven," and Professor
Moses Gerrish Farmer, who broke new paths into the once unknown. As
early as 1859, Mr. Farmer lighted his whole house with electric
lights, and blew up a little ship by a tiny submarine torpedo in 1847,
and in the same year propelled by electricity a car carrying
passengers. Yet neither of these names is found in the majority of
ordinary cyclopedias or books of reference.
Familiar with such facts, both by a general observation of life, and
by a special and critical study of the literature of patents and
inventions, Carleton felt perfectly willing to devote himself to a
work that he knew would yield but little popular applause, even when
victory should be won,--the abolition of railway level or "grade"
crossings.
During a brief morning call on Carleton, shortly after he had been
elected Senator in the Massachusetts Legislature for the session of
1890, I asked him what he proposed especially to do. "Well," said he,
"I think that if I can get all grade crossings abolished from the
railroads of the whole Commonwealth, it will be a good winter's work."
Forthwith he set himself to study the problem, to master resources and
statistics, to learn the relation between capital invested and profits
made by the railway corporation, and especially to measure the forces
in favor of and in opposition to the proposed reform.
About this time, the chief servant of Shawmut Church was studying an
allied question. While the "grade crossing" slew its thousands of
non-travelling citizens, the freight-car, with its link-and-pin
coupling, its block-bumpers, its hand-brakes, its slippery roofs, its
manifold shiftings over frogs and switches, slew its tens of thousands
of railway operatives. On the grade crossings, the victims were
chiefly old, deaf, or blind men and women, cripples, children,
drunkards, and miscellaneous people. On the other hand, the
freight-cars killed almost exclusively the flower of the country's
manhood. The tens of thousands of hands crushed between bumpers, of
arms and legs cut off, of bodies broken and mangled, were, in the
majority of cases, those of healthy, intelligent men, between the ages
of eighteen and fifty, and usually breadwinners for whole families.
The slaughter every year was equal to that of a battle at Waterloo or
Gettysburg. Fairy tales about monsters devouring human beings, legends
of colossal dragons swallowing annually their quota of fair virgins,
were insignificant expressions of damage done to the human race
compared to that annual tribute poured into the insatiable maw of the
railway Moloch. Every great line of traffic, like the Pennsylvania or
New York Central Railway, ate up a man a day. Sometimes, between
sunrise and sunset, a single road made four or five widows, with a
profusion of orphans.
Yet two men, each of the name of Coffin, and each of that superb
Nantucket stock which has enriched our nation and carried the American
flag to every sea, were working in the West and the East, for the
abolition of legalized slaughter. Lorenzo Coffin, of Iowa, a distant
cousin of Carleton's, whom so many railway men always salute as
"father," had been for years trying to throttle the two twin enemies
of the railway man, alcohol, and the freight-car equipment of
link-and-pin coupler and hand-brake. It was he who agitated
unceasingly for national protection to railway men, and to the
brakeman especially. He and his fellow reformers asked for a law
compelling the use of a brake which would relieve the crew from such
awful exposure and foolhardy risk of life on the icy roofs of the
cars in winter, and for couplers which, by abolishing the iron link
and pin, would save the constant and almost certain crushing of the
hands which the shifting of the cars compelled when coupled in the old
way.
For a long time Lorenzo Coffin's efforts seemed utterly useless. This
was simply because human life was cheaper than machinery, and because
public opinion on this particular subject had not yet become
Christian. It was Jesus Christ who raised the value of both the human
body and the human soul, abolished gladiatorial shows, raised up
hospitals, created cemeteries, even for the poorest, made life
insurance companies possible, and put even such value on human life as
could be recovered in action by law from corporations which murder men
through sordid economy or criminal carelessness. Lorenzo Coffin
wrought for the application of Christianity to railway men. When
finally the law was passed, compelling safety-couplers and air-brakes,
and when, in the constitution of New York State, the limit of five
thousand dollars replevin for a human life destroyed by a corporation
was abolished, and no limit set, there were two new triumphs of
Christianity. In these phenomena, we see only further illustrations of
that Kingdom of Heaven proclaimed by Christ, and illustrated both in
the hidden leaven and the phenomenal mustard-seed.
A sermon by the pastor of Shawmut Church, on "Lions that devour,"
depicted the great American slaughter-field. It set forth the array of
figures as given him in the reports of the Inter-State Commerce
Commission, sent by his friend, the Hon. Augustus Schoonmaker, of
Kingston, New York, and then in Washington, one of the Commissioners.
There was considerable surprise and criticism from among his auditors,
and the facts as set forth were doubted. There were present, as usual
on Sunday mornings in Shawmut Church, men of public affairs,
presidents of banks, the collector of the port of Boston, a general in
the regular army, a veteran colonel of volunteers, several officers of
railway companies, and, most of all, Mr. Charles Carleton Coffin. He
and they thought the statements given of the slaughter of young men on
railroads in the United States must be incredible. Even Carleton had
not then informed himself concerning that great field of blood
extending from ocean to ocean, and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf,
which every year was strewn with the corpses or mangled limbs of
twenty-five thousand people. He thought his friend in the pulpit must
be mistaken, and frankly told him so.
On the following Sunday, having received the figures for the current
year, from the best authority in Washington, the preacher was able to
say that his statements of last Sunday had been below reality, and
that, instead of exaggerating, he had underestimated the facts. This
gave Mr. Coffin, as he afterwards confessed, fresh impetus in his
determination to get grade crossings abolished in Massachusetts.
Having first personally interviewed the presidents of several great
railroads leading out from Boston, and finding one or two heartily in
favor of the idea, two or three more not in opposition, and scarcely a
majority opposed, he persevered. He pressed the matter, and the bill
was carried and signed by the governor. It provided that within a term
of years all grade crossings in Massachusetts should be abolished.
This will require the expenditure of many millions of dollars, the
sinking or elevating of tracks, and the making of tunnels and bridges.
The work was nobly begun. At this moment, in May, 1898, the progress
is steadily forward to the great consummation.
Though his measure for the protection of human life received very
little popular notice, Carleton counted it one of the best things that
God had allowed him to do. And certainly, among the noble and truly
Christian measures for the good of society, in this last decade of the
century, the work done by Lorenzo Coffin in Iowa, as well as in the
country at large, and by Senator Charles Carleton Coffin in
Massachusetts,--a State whose example will be followed by
others,--must ever be remembered by the grateful student of social
progress. Surely, Carleton proved himself not merely a politician, but
a statesman.
The welfare of the city of Boston was ever dear to Carleton's heart.
He gave a great deal of time and thought to thinking out problems
affecting its welfare, and hence was often a welcome speaker at club
meetings, which are so numerous, so delightful, and, certainly, in
their number, peculiar to Boston. He wrote for the press, giving his
views freely, whenever any vital question was before the people. This
often entailed severe labor and the sacrifice of time to one who could
never boast very much of this world's goods.
When the writer first, in 1886, came to Boston to live, he found the
horse everywhere in the city; when he left it in 1893 there was only
the trolley. The motor power was carried through the air from a
central source. It is even yet, however, a test of one's knowledge of
Boston--a city not laid out by William Penn, but by cows and admirers
of crookedness--to understand the street-car system of the city. Most
of the street passenger lines fell gradually into the hands of one
great corporation, which vastly improved the service, enlarging and
making more comfortable, not to say luxurious, the accommodations, and
by unification enabling one to ride astonishing distances for a nickel
coin.
From the peculiar shape of the city and the converging of the
thoroughfares on Tremont Street, fronting the Common and the old
burying grounds, the space between Boylston Street and Cornhill was,
at certain hours of the day, in a painful state of congestion. Then
the stoppage of the cars, the loss of time, and the waste of temper
was something which no nineteenth century man could stand with
equanimity. How to relieve the congestion was the difficulty. Should
there be an elevated railway, or a new avenue opened through the midst
of the city? This was the question.
To this subject, Carleton gave his earnest attention. He remembered
the day when the now elegant region of the Back Bay was marsh and
water, when schooners discharged coal and lumber in that Public
Garden, which in June looks like a day of heaven on earth, and when
Tremont Street stopped at the crossing of the Boston and Albany
railway. Even as late as 1850 the population included within the
ten-mile radius of the city hall was but 267,861; in 1890, the
increase was to 841,617; and the same ratio of increase will give, in
1930, 2,700,000 souls. In 1871, seventeen million people were moved
into Boston by steam; in 1891, fifty-one millions. At the same ratio
of increase, on the opening of the twentieth century, there will be
100,000,000 persons riding in from the suburbs, and of travellers in
the street-cars, in A. D. 1910, nearly half a billion.
Carleton, the engineer and statesman, believed that neither a subway
nor an elevated railway would solve the problem. He spoke, lectured,
and wrote, in favor of a central city viaduct. For both surface and
elevated railways, he proposed an avenue eighty feet wide, making a
clear road from Tremont to Causeway Streets.
Moreover, he believed that the city should own the roads that should
transport passengers within the city limits. He was not afraid of that
kind of socialism which provides for the absolute necessities of
modern associated life. He expected great amelioration to come to
society from the breaking up and passing away of the old relics of
feudalism, as well as of the power of the privileged man as against
man, of wealth against commonwealth. He believed that transportation
within city limits should be under public ownership and control. He
therefore opposed the subway and the incorporation of the Boston
Elevated Railroad Company.
One of his most vigorous letters, occupying a column and a half, in
the Boston _Herald_ of July 17, 1895, is a powerful plea for the
rejection by the people of an act which should give the traffic of the
streets of Boston and surrounding municipalities into the hands of a
corporation for all time. He considered that the act, which had been
rushed through the legislature in one day at the close of the session,
was a hasty piece of patchwork made by dovetailing two bills together,
and was highly objectionable. He wrote:
"Why shall the people give away their own rights? Do they not own the
ground beneath the surface and the air above the surface?... What need
is there of a corporation? Cannot the people in their sovereign
capacity do for themselves all that a corporation can do? Why give
away their rights, and burden themselves with taxes for the benefit of
a corporation?
"Does some one say it is a nationalistic idea? Then it is nationalism
for Boston to own Quincy Market, the water supply, the system of
sewerage. Far different from governmental ownership of railroads, with
the complications of interstate commerce, is the proposition for
public ownership of street railways. A street is a highway. Why shall
not the subway under the street, or the structure over it, be a
highway, built and owned by the people, and for their use and benefit,
and not for the enrichment of a corporation?"
After forcibly presenting the reasonable objections to the bill, he
closed by pleading that it be rejected, and that the next legislature
be asked to establish a metropolitan district and the appointment of a
commission with full power to do everything that could be done under
the bill, "not for the greed of a corporation, but for the welfare of
the people."