By further figuring, it appeared that between New York and Rochester the Erie ran eight passenger-trains each way every day—­16 altogether; and carried a daily average of 6,000 persons.  That is about a million in six months—­the population of New York City.  Well, the Erie kills from 13 to 23 persons of its million in six months; and in the same time 13,000 of New York’s million die in their beds!  My flesh crept, my hair stood on end.  “This is appalling!” I said.  “The danger isn’t in traveling by rail, but in trusting to those deadly beds.  I will never sleep in a bed again.”

I had figured on considerably less than one-half the length of the Erie road.  It was plain that the entire road must transport at least eleven or twelve thousand people every day.  There are many short roads running out of Boston that do fully half as much; a great many such roads.  There are many roads scattered about the Union that do a prodigious passenger business.  Therefore it was fair to presume that an average of 2,500 passengers a day for each road in the country would be almost correct.  There are 846 railway lines in our country, and 846 times 2,500 are 2,115,000.  So the railways of America move more than two millions of people every day; six hundred and fifty millions of people a year, without counting the Sundays.  They do that, too—­there is no question about it; though where they get the raw material is clear beyond the jurisdiction of my arithmetic; for I have hunted the census through and through, and I find that there are not that many people in the United States, by a matter of six hundred and ten millions at the very least.  They must use some of the same people over again, likely.

San Francisco is one-eighth as populous as New York; there are 60 deaths a week in the former and 500 a week in the latter—­if they have luck.  That is 3,120 deaths a year in San Francisco, and eight times as many in New York—­say about 25,000 or 26,000.  The health of the two places is the same.  So we will let it stand as a fair presumption that this will hold good all over the country, and that consequently 25,000 out of every million of people we have must die every year.  That amounts to one-fortieth of our total population.  One million of us, then, die annually.  Out of this million ten or twelve thousand are stabbed, shot, drowned, hanged, poisoned, or meet a similarly violent death in some other popular way, such as perishing by kerosene-lamp and hoop-skirt conflagrations, getting buried in coal-mines, falling off house-tops, breaking through church, or lecture-room floors, taking patent medicines, or committing suicide in other forms.  The Erie railroad kills 23 to 46; the other 845 railroads kill an average of one-third of a man each; and the rest of that million, amounting in the aggregate to that appalling figure of 987,631 corpses, die naturally in their beds!

You will excuse me from taking any more chances on those beds.  The railroads are good enough for me.