Suppose that a bridge now standing is exactly as unsafe as the Ashtabula bridge was the day before it fell, would it be possible to awaken public attention enough to have it examined? Probably not. About two years ago an attempt was made to induce one of the leading dailies in this country to expose a wretchedly unsafe bridge in New England. The editor declined, on the ground that the matter was not of sufficient interest for his readers; but less than a month afterwards he devoted three columns of his paper to a detailed account of a bridge disaster in Scotland, and asked why it was that such things must happen, and if there was no way of determining in advance whether a bridge was safe, or not?
This editor certainly would not maintain, that, in itself, it was more important to describe a disaster after it had occurred than to endeavor to prevent the occurrence; but, as a business man, he knew perfectly well that his patrons would read an account giving all of the sickening detail of a terrible catastrophe, while few, if any, would wade through a dry discussion of the means for protecting the public from just such disasters. The public is always very indignant with the effect, but does not care to trouble itself with the cause; but the effect never will be prevented until the cause is controlled; and the sooner the public understands that the cause is in its own hands, to be controlled, or not, as it chooses, the sooner we shall have a remedy for the fearful disasters which are altogether too common in the United States.
In a country where government controls all matters on which the public safety depends, and where no bridge over which the public is to pass is allowed to be built except after the plans have been approved by competent authority, where no work can be executed except under the rigid inspection of the best experts, nor opened to the public until it has been officially tested and accepted, it makes little or no difference whether the public is informed, or not, upon these matters; but in a country like the United States, where any man may at any time open a shop for the manufacture of bridges, whether he knows any thing about the business, or not, and is at liberty to use cheap and insufficient material, and where public officers are always to be found ready to buy such bridges, simply because the first cost is low, and to place them in the public ways, it makes a good deal of difference. There is at present in this country absolutely no law, no control, no inspection, which can prevent the building and the use of unsafe bridges; and there never will be until the people who make the laws see the need of such control.