Identify Fallacious Reasoning in a Text

Identify Fallacious Reasoning in a Text

In a 1-page essay, provide an analysis that identifies fallacious reasoning in the story and explain why.

1.  Written in 1870.
THE DANGER OF LYING IN BED
The man in the ticket-office said:
"Have an accident insurance ticket, also?"
"No," I said, after studying the matter over a little.  "No, I
believe not; I am going to be traveling by rail all day today.
However, tomorrow I don't travel.  Give me one for tomorrow."
The man looked puzzled.  He said:
"But it is for accident insurance, and if you are going to travel
by rail--"
"If I am going to travel by rail I sha'n't need it.  Lying at home
in bed is the thing _I_ am afraid of."
I had been looking into this matter.  Last year I traveled twenty
thousand miles, almost entirely by rail; the year before, I traveled
over twenty-five thousand miles, half by sea and half by rail;
and the year before that I traveled in the neighborhood of ten
thousand miles, exclusively by rail.  I suppose if I put in all
the little odd journeys here and there, I may say I have traveled
sixty thousand miles during the three years I have mentioned.
AND NEVER AN ACCIDENT.
For a good while I said to myself every morning:  "Now I
have escaped thus far, and so the chances are just that much
increased that I shall catch it this time.  I will be shrewd,
and buy an accident ticket."  And to a dead moral certainty I
drew a blank, and went to bed that night without a joint started
or a bone splintered.  I got tired of that sort of daily bother,
and fell to buying accident tickets that were good for a month.
I said to myself, "A man CAN'T buy thirty blanks in one bundle."

But I was mistaken.  There was never a prize in the the lot.

I could read of railway accidents every day--the newspaper
atmosphere was foggy with them; but somehow they never came my way.
I found I had spent a good deal of money in the accident business,
and had nothing to show for it.  My suspicions were aroused, and I
began to hunt around for somebody that had won in this lottery.
I found plenty of people who had invested, but not an individual
that had ever had an accident or made a cent.  I stopped buying
accident tickets and went to ciphering.  The result was astounding.
THE PERIL LAY NOT IN TRAVELING, BUT IN STAYING AT HOME.
I hunted up statistics, and was amazed to find that after all
the glaring newspaper headlines concerning railroad disasters,
less than THREE HUNDRED people had really lost their lives by those
disasters in the preceding twelve months.  The Erie road was set
down as the most murderous in the list.  It had killed forty-six
--or twenty-six, I do not exactly remember which, but I know the
number was double that of any other road.  But the fact straightway
suggested itself that the Erie was an immensely long road, and did
more business than any other line in the country; so the double
number of killed ceased to be matter for surprise.
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.
And my advice to all people is, Don't stay at home any more than
you can help; but when you have GOT to stay at home a while,
buy a package of those insurance tickets and sit up nights.
You cannot be too cautious.
[One can see now why I answered that ticket-agent in the manner
recorded at the top of this sketch.]
The moral of this composition is, that thoughtless people grumble
more than is fair about railroad management in the United States.
When we consider that every day and night of the year full fourteen
thousand railway-trains of various kinds, freighted with life
and armed with death, go thundering over the land, the marvel is,
NOT that they kill three hundred human beings in a twelvemonth,
but that they do not kill three hundred times three hundred!
PORTRAIT OF KING WILLIAM III
I never can look at those periodical portraits in THE GALAXY magazine
without feeling a wild, tempestuous ambition to be an artist.
I have seen thousands and thousands of pictures in my time
--acres of them here and leagues of them in the galleries of Europe
--but never any that moved me as these portraits do.
There is a portrait of Monsignore Capel in the November number,
now COULD anything be sweeter than that?  And there was Bismarck's,
in the October number; who can look at that without being purer
and stronger and nobler for it?  And Thurlow and Weed's picture
in the September number; I would not have died without seeing that,
no, not for anything this world can give.  But look back still
further and recall my own likeness as printed in the August number;
if I had been in my grave a thousand years when that appeared,
I would have got up and visited the artist.
I sleep with all these portraits under my pillow every night, so that
I can go on studying them as soon as the day dawns in the morning.
I know them all as thoroughly as if I had made them myself; I know
every line and mark about them.  Sometimes when company are present
I shuffle the portraits all up together, and then pick them out
one by one and call their names, without referring to the printing
on the bottom.  I seldom make a mistake--never, when I am calm.
I have had the portraits framed for a long time, waiting till
my aunt gets everything ready for hanging them up in the parlor.
But first one thing and then another interferes, and so the thing
is delayed.  Once she said they would have more of the peculiar kind
of light they needed in the attic.  The old simpleton! it is as dark
as a tomb up there.  But she does not know anything about art,
and so she has no reverence for it.  When I showed her my "Map of
the Fortifications of Paris," she said it was rubbish.
Well, from nursing those portraits so long, I have come at last
to have a perfect infatuation for art.  I have a teacher now,
and my enthusiasm continually and tumultuously grows, as I learn
to use with more and more facility the pencil, brush, and graver.
I am studying under De Mellville, the house and portrait painter.
[His name was Smith when he lived in the West.] He does any kind