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Show i DANGEROUS OCCUPATIONS: MEN WHO RISK THEIR LIVES DAILY IN " PURSUING THEIR ORDINARY AVOCATIONS "All that a man hoth," says inspired wisdom, "will he give for his lite. Yet to one studying the risks taken every day in the ordinary course of business it must appear that human life is about the cheapest thing on the market. mar-ket. Not only is it dealt in on a wholesale whole-sale scale by capitalists, who reckon on so many deaths for so many thousands thou-sands of dollars spent in their undertakings, under-takings, but it seems to be regarded as of no value by the men who take the risks. The workman asks no higher pay because he swings his pick in the constant companionship of death. He sells his labor at the market rate, and throws in a lottery ticket on his life for good measure. Novelists find romance in the life of the sea, but to sailors it is simply hard, grinding work for low pay. It is also full of danger, but the sailor does not worry about that. He is an irrepressible gambler, but the thing he grumbles about are poor food, poor quarters, "blood money," robbery by boarding-house keepers, and kicks and cuffs from mates. When he gets the order to lay out on the royal-ward, with the wind screaming through the rigging and the ship heeling until the spars seem ready to slip into the racing rac-ing waves that rise furiously to meet it, he does not complain because he is risking his life for twenty-five dollars a month and a mess of moldy hardtack hard-tack and condemned beef. If he slips and disappears from human sight it is all in the day's work. He does feel however, that he ought to have something some-thing like a fair chance, and If he comes to his death through a rotten foot-rope his surviving comrades may resent it. He has also been known to and air-hose behind him, and if one of them tangles Itself about a splinter or a clump of clinging seaweed the diver may join the ghastly company of skeletons, skel-etons, grinning at him in the cabin of the wreck. Thfere is no chance for him to sava himself by swimming if anything any-thing goes wrong. Anchored down by his copper helmet and eighty pounds of lead in his shoes, he must wait for the last judgment where his broken air-pipe leaves him. The dangersof railroad-workers have been diminished of late years through the general introduction of safety appliances, ap-pliances, but they are still greater than those of a soldier in the field. In the year 1900 two thousand one hundred hun-dred and fifty employes were killed on the railroads of the United States, and thirty-six thousand six hundred and forty-three were wounded. On an average aver-age the American railway system demands de-mands the lives of eight of its workers, work-ers, and malms a hundred more every day in the year. That is exclusive, of course, of the smaller slaughter of passengers, and takes no account of the substantial contribution made to the lists of dead and wounded by the trolley lines. . In five years American railroads killed over ten thousand of their men, and wounded over one hundred hun-dred and sixty thousand. Compared with that record the casualty lists of the Spanish, the Philippine and South African wars fade into inslgnficanca. The roll of dangerous occupations is endless. And nowhere does a vacation seem any less popular because it Involves In-volves the risk of death. Men may strike for higher wages, for comfort, for shorter hours, for points of punctilio, punc-tilio, for any one of a thousand things, but nobody ever strikes for safety. In- coals, all strike the popular imagination imagina-tion like the soldier's battles. But the fireman's dangers do not end with his battles. He is risking his life in less spectacular ways all the time. His mere exercises are hazardous. Sometimes Some-times he drops from a roof to test a safety-net. If he gets killed he has proved that the net is not satisfactory. satisfac-tory. Sometimes he has occasion to try a new extens ion ladder. If you j have ever had to climb a ladder eighty or more feet high, resting against the side of a house, you know that the sensation is thrilling. But that is as commonplace as walking upstairs compared com-pared with the sensation of climbing a ladder that rests against nothing. The tremendous leverage puts a strain upon up-on the lower end of the contrivance that will search out a flaw if there Is any there, and a puff of wind may shift the center of gravity and capsize the whole apparatus. The soldier fights with the encouragement encour-agement and support of his comrades; the policeman oftenest fights alone, but it is not always in fighting that the bluecoat takes his life in his honds. He goes within the fire-lines and helps the fireman to rescue women wom-en and children from burning houses. Let a team of fear-crazed horses come careering down a park drive, scattering scatter-ing nurse maids and sending pedestrians pedes-trians scurrying for shelter, and a moment later a mounted policeman will be seen galloping in pursuit. He gains on the flying runaways, and as he creeps past them inch by inch he leans over, and reaches for a bit. Unless Un-less he is dragged out of the saddle and trampled under the hoofs of the frightened brutes his tally of lives saved receives some additions. Sometimes it is not a mounted policeman, po-liceman, but a "bike-cop" who performs per-forms this feat. As he reaches the head of the runaway he rises on his pedals, kicks his machine away from him, and hangs dragging on the bit. In that courage seems to have reached its high-water mark. It is hard to imagine im-agine what could be beyond it. The steeple-jack leads a merry life, and sometimes a short one. He likes to play with death, and sometimes for the amusement of the spectators below be-low he will stand on his head or extend ex-tend himself by his arms at two hundred hun-dred feet from the ground, but he is not quite as careless as he looks. He never moves a hand or a foot without with-out knowing exactly where he- is going go-ing to put it. Long habit has disciplined dis-ciplined every muscle. An ordinary man is subject to involuntary movements move-ments the unconscious reflections of external stimuli. When he hears a noise he starts; if anything drops on his fingers he jerks them away. That would be fatal in the business of steeple-climbing. If the steeple-jack should jump when he heard a noise, or snatch away the hand that supported him if a hammer fell on it, he would make his next trip in an ambulance. While some men hunt for danger on the heights others look for it in the depths. The naked native who dives for pearls in the Vermilion sea or on the banks of Ceylon is in peril from sharks, devil-fish and the revolt of outraged nature, that sends the blood gushing from ears to nose when the limit of endurance is crowded too far. But his risks are trivial compared with those taken by the civilized diver who penetrates the abysses of the sea for day-wages. His life is absolutely dependent upon uninterrupted communication com-munication with his helpers above. Not only the shark and the devil-fish, but the smallest creature that can cut his air-hose may sentence him to a death that no human power can avert. He winds through the tortuous recesses of sunken hulks, trailing his life Hne I m -iff Bl grumble on discovering discov-ering that he has been sent to sea on a ship designed to sink for insurance. The "bronco-buster" is an admirable subject for the artist, ar-tist, but it is the spectator who gets all the picturesque-ness picturesque-ness of his occupation. oc-cupation. The human hu-man organism is wonderfully held together or the first jolt of a bucking buck-ing bronco would shake it to pieces. But even the raw hide physique of a western cowboy can not withstand that fiendish battering for an hour at a time without serious seri-ous consequences. Sooner or later the bronco-buster's maltreated mal-treated internal organs or-gans give way, and he takes a premature prema-ture departure from a world in which he might easily 1 have lived for forty years longer If he had adopted some less arduous trade. But he may not live One of the Risks a Fireman Takes. deed the tendency is often precisely the other way. In Kngland, a generation genera-tion or so ago, some reformers learned with horror that the operatives in certain cer-tain factories were working under conditions con-ditions that destroyed their lung3 and left them on au average only half a dozen years of life. In their effort to stop this sacrifice they found their most persistent opponents among the men they were trying to benefit. These men were willing to die, but they were not willing to Invite competition by making their vocation attractive to the crowd. A Lineman at 0 reach even such Work. an en( ag that. One slip and trampling hoofs may snuff out his life in the course of his first day's work The soldier in wartime takes a good many risks, but for the fireman it Is always war. It is needless to recount the hazards of actual fire-fighting. These are generally appreciated the hell (f smoke and flame, the forlorn hopei among caving floors and falling walls, the rescue-dashes through volcanic vol-canic windows Into craters of glowing |