than that of an
ignorant peasant mother. A woman was a woman, whether she wore rags
or pearls. A life was given for a life, with no assertion that one was
priceless and the other comparatively valueless.

Many of those who elected to remain might have escaped. "Chivalry" is a
mild appellation for their conduct. Some of the vaunted knights of old
were desperate cowards by comparison. A fight in the open field, or
jousting in the tournament, did not call out the manhood in a man as did
the waiting till the great ship took the final plunge, in the knowledge
that the seas round about were covered with loving and yearning
witnesses whose own salvation was not assured.

When the roll is called hereafter of those who are "purged of pride
because they died, who know the worth of their days," let the names of
the men who went down with the Titanic be found written there in the
sight of God and men.

THE OBVIOUS LESSON

And, whatever view of the accident be taken, whether the moralist shall
use it to point the text of a solemn or denunciatory warning, or whether
the materialist, swinging to the other extreme, scouts any other theory
than that of the "fortuitous concurrence of atoms," there is scarcely a
thinking mortal who has heard of what happened who has not been deeply
stirred, in the sense of a personal bereavement, to a profound humility
and the conviction of his own insignificance in the greater universal
scheme.

Many there are whom the influences of religion do not move, and upon
whose hearts most generous sentiments knock in vain, who still are
overawed and bowed by the magnitude of this catastrophe. No matter what
they believe about it, the effect is the same. The effect is to reduce
a man from the swaggering braggart--the vainglorious lord of what he
sees--the self-made master of fate, of nature, of time, of space, of
everything--to his true microscopic stature in the cosmos. He goes in
tears to put together again the fragments of the few, small, pitiful
things that belonged to him.

"Though Love may pine, and Reason chafe,
There came a Voice without reply."

The only comfort, all that can bring surcease of sorrow, is that men
fashioned in the image of their Maker rose to the emergency like heroes,
and went to their grave as bravely as any who have given their lives
at any time in war. The hearts of those who waited on the land, and
agonized, and were impotent to save, have been laid