The attention of the Interstate Commerce Commission has been called to the urgent need of Congressional legislation for the better protection of the lives and limbs of those engaged in operating the great interstate freight lines of the country, and especially of the yardmen and brakemen.  A petition signed by nearly 10,000 railway brakemen was presented to the Commission asking that steps might be taken to bring about the use of automatic brakes and couplers on freight cars.

At a meeting of State railroad commissioners and their accredited representatives held at Washington in March last upon the invitation of the Interstate Commerce Commission a resolution was unanimously adopted urging the Commission “to consider what can be done to prevent the loss of life and limb in coupling and uncoupling freight cars and in handling the brakes of such cars.”  During the year ending June 30, 1888, over 2,000 railroad employees were killed in service and more than 20,000 injured.  It is competent, I think, for Congress to require uniformity in the construction of cars used in interstate commerce and the use of improved safety appliances upon such trains.  Time will be necessary to make the needed changes, but an earnest and intelligent beginning should be made at once.  It is a reproach to our civilization that any class of American workmen should in the pursuit of a necessary and useful vocation be subjected to a peril of life and limb as great as that of a soldier in time of war.

The creation of an Executive Department to be known as the Department of Agriculture by the act of February 9 last was a wise and timely response to a request which had long been respectfully urged by the farmers of the country; but much remains to be done to perfect the organization of the Department so that it may fairly realize the expectations which its creation excited.  In this connection attention is called to the suggestions contained in the report of the Secretary, which is herewith submitted.  The need of a law officer for the Department such as is provided for the other Executive Departments is manifest.  The failure of the last Congress to make the usual provision for the publication of the annual report should be promptly remedied.  The public interest in the report and its value to the farming community, I am sure, will not be diminished under the new organization of the Department.

I recommend that the weather service be separated from the War Department and established as a bureau in the Department of Agriculture.  This will involve an entire reorganization both of the Weather Bureau and of the Signal Corps, making of the first a purely civil organization and of the other a purely military staff corps.  The report of the Chief Signal Officer shows that the work of the corps on its military side has been deteriorating.