The Evening Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, and Echo. TUESDAY, APRIL 16, 1901. THE PERILS OF THE STREET.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXII, Issue 89, 16 April 1901, Page 4

The Evening Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, and Echo.

TUESDAY, APRIL 16, 1901. THE PERILS OF THE STREET.

For the caos9 that lacks assistance, ?or the wrong that needs resistance, For the future In the distance, jnd the good that we oan do.

Prayer is specially offered lor those in peril on the sea; but the perils of the city street to life and limb —not to speak of purse and character — are more numerous. They do not appeal to the imagination, and through it, to the heart, so powerfully as the danger of tempest and shipwreck; but statistics of accident, disease, and death, are against the city and in favour of »

"A life on the ocean wave. A home on the rolling: deep." This is chiefly true of the great cities of the Old World. On some of their crowded thoroughfares human existence seems a constant miracle. Passengers and vehicular traffic mingle in the most alarming ways. But for the uplifted hand of the London policeman at some street j crossings, scenes of wildest confusion and accident would be of daily occurrence. This danger is still somewhat remote to us, and yet it would have been well if our city powers and pioneers had provided better against it. If they had been foreseeing enough, in view of growing trade and population, to have taken the Boulevards of Paris instead of the London Strand as their pattern for the main streets of our colonial cit.'es —as in Adelaide and in luvercargill—then the old chief gully of Auckland —the Queen of our streets—where in wet seasons streams of bacterial mud, as well as of business life still meet and mingle, and where clouds of destructive dust injure the goods and shorten the lives of our shopkeeperswould have been a daily residence of a more healthy order.

Indeed our colonial towns are only awakening, under the useful plague scare, to the serious perils of the insanitary condition of their streets. Our various necessities, comforts, pleasures, have been fairly well attended to, while we have permitted our general health to be lowered and our hospitals at certain annual seasons to be overcrowded by preventible diseases, bringing often the sorrows of death to our homes.

With the advaaiee of modern conveniences also the number of the risks we run in city streets increases. We may rejoice in all the marvellous progress and possibilities of electrical science, and in the prospective speed and conifort of our long"-delayed electric cars; but the Home newspapers, in their accounts of a recent sensational accident, in Liverpool, convey a warning. Electrocution may be a merciful form of human death; when properly conducted it may be an improvement upon the lingering barbaric forms of death •made use of still by civilisation for criminals dangerous to life, law atld liberty. But electrocution by the accidental breaking of overhead wires charged with electricity is not so satisfactory to contemplate. A stack of wires overloaded with snow in Liverpool broke down, came into contact with the tram car wires, and. fell upon a mass of people returning to their homes from the city toil and business, killing two and severely injuring many others. Of course, we have no snow storms to overburden our overhead wires; but we have already had a. taste of their perils at'the recent great fire in Auckland; semi-tropical storms of another kind, and imperfect supports for our overhead wires, might make up for the danger of the snow storms. Without occasioning any needless alarm, the word of. warning from the Liverpool accident may be of use in rendering things safer in Auckland. As the expense of underground wires cannot be faced, the overhead ones must be made with the greatest possible safety to life and limb. The prospect of special prayers to be*saved from the perils of the street by. electricity is not pleasing to contemplate. Death by accidental electrocution is certainly not deprived of its sting and terrors^ and it is the duty of the corporation to see that this danger is eliminated from the list of the possible causes of injury we run in the use of the city streets. _