h 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