I came across a comparison between the risks of travelling by stage coach versus steam packets. With the recent automated car accident fresh in my mind, and having often been told how much safer air travel is than road travel, I thought I’d share it. Does any of it sound familiar?

If the number of persons who have been killed, maimed, and disfigured for life, in consequence of stage-coach mishaps, could be ascertained, since the first establishment of steam-packets in this country, and on the other hand, the number who have been similarly unfortunate by steam boilers bursting, we should find that the stage-coach proportion would be in the ration of ten to one!

A solitary “blow up” of a steam-packet is “noised and proclaimed” from the Land’s End to the other extremity of the island; while hundreds of coach-accidents, and many of them fatal, occur, which are never heard of beyond the village, near to which the casualty takes place, or the neighbouring ale-house.

These affairs it is to the interest of the proprietors to “hush up,” by means of a gratuity to the injured, rather than have their property ruined by an exposure in a court of justice. Should a poor man have a leg or an arm broken, through the carelessness of a drunken coachman, his poverty prevents his having recourse to law.

Justice, in these cases, nine times in ten, is entirely out of the question, and an arrangement, between him and the proprietors, is easily effected; the unfortunate fellow, rather receiving fifty or a hundred pounds “hush money” than bring his action, when, perhaps from some technical informality in the proceedings (should he find a lawyer willing to act for him, being poor), he would be nonsuited, with all the costs of both parties on his own shoulders, and be, moreover, ruined for ever, in both purse and person.