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.”