Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/216

204 certain group of teachers, and throw the whole blame on the "depravity of human nature." True, it is not conducive to delicacy of feeling or to accuracy of scientific perception to toil for hours together in the Cimmerian gloom of the coal mine. Very little idea can be formed, by forty-nine fiftieths of the population of this country, of the cost of human toil at which their houses are kept warm and bright. Especially when the coal is worked in thin beds is the toil of the miner all but intolerable. In some instances he actually lies full length on the floor of the working, clad in nothing but a scanty pair of drawers, working with his pick a little in advance of his head as he lies. Nor does he cast off the badge of toil when he returns to the light of day. The other day a colonel in the army, a man deeply interested in all mechanical and scientific improvement, who was staying in one of the great mining centers, happened to go to a public establishment in the town in order to take a Turkish bath. While he was waiting for his room, two miners came out, who had been enjoying that unusual luxury. "I say, Jack," said one of them, "Moll won't know me. She never saw my skin white." His wife had never seen him washed, except his face. This may be an extreme case; as in some of the Welsh districts the "tubbing" of the men on the Saturday night takes place before the doors of their houses. But we give the incident as it actually occurred.

But pass all this. Let us attribute to the miner as extravagant a perversity of nature as the most zealous missionary can insist upon—he is at all events something better than a beast. Even a beast has the instinct of self-preservation. In man it is, there can be no denial, usually the very keenest of his instincts. And whatever the miner may know, and of whatever he may be ignorant, from his first apprenticeship underground he has had held up to his imagination the fearful and ever-present peril of the fire-damp. Abuse him as we may—and for our own part we should be very sorry to speak of him in any terms but those of cordial respect—we have not got a single step on our journey toward the solution of the question, What makes him run a risk that he knows to be hazardous?

Reader, have you ever been underground—not for amusement or out of curiosity, but in the discharge of your duty? If so, have you ever been alone underground, in a solitary point of the workings? And, if so, have you ever, by any accident, found yourself left in total darkness. The writer has had this experience, and it is one that leads him to speak with somewhat more of human sympathy for the collier than might be natural for a literary man who is not also a workman.

The oppression of utter darkness on the human organization is terrible. And hardly less than the oppression of utter darkness is the irritation produced by inadequate light. When, as they begin to number seven times seven years, the gradual diminution in the focal length of the vision often suffers a rather rapid increase, persons who