The Safety First Conception.

In a recent leading article in the London “Times” under the titls “Mental Banisters,” some important observations are made concerning the old proverb that “accidents will happen in the best regulated households” and that safety first attempts to prevent them are the outcome of counsels of perfection rather than of common sense. “That accidents” said the writer “in the great majority of cases, need not happen, and that no household or factory can be called well regulated in which accidents are at all frequent… has been shown as the result of painstaking labours in many fields of industry… Whereas accident prevention in the past has been concerned almost exclusively with mechanical means of saving men and women from themselves—for example, the banister of a stair—the new accident prevention aims at a change of heart. It seeks to implant in the mind of each individual exposed to risk a clear and permanent conception of that risk and a clear and permanent idea as to how that risk may be avoided. The worker so trained possesses mental ‘banisters’ and ‘guards.’”

“Accidents,” he concludes, “are ‘robbers of industry’ by reason not only of their cruel effect on their victims but also by reason of their evil influence on the whole body of workers and on … total output. It is certainly true that a sense of safety is a factor making for happiness and health and efficiency, while a sense of danger—and every industrial accident gives rise to a sense of danger, however vague, in the minds of all those employed—militates against human welfare and human work.”

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