t is likely to make the best
citizen, but the one that has the best chance of developing itself in
healthy surroundings. And it is a curious commentary, if it were true,
to argue that a good and wise God so arranged things that pain and
suffering, even undeserved suffering, should be the main way for the
development of character.

A strange but not uncommon argument is used by Canon Green in dealing
with the suffering incidental to the various disasters that overtake
mankind from time to time. Suffering, he says, has a certain element of
martyrdom about it. Even evils due to human greed and carelessness bring
some benefit in their train. Thus, apropos of the _Titanic_ disaster:--

Every such disaster tends to produce some improvement for future
generations. Shipowners are forced to supply more boats, wireless
instalment is required on all ships; the idle rich are led to think
less of saving useless time and more of saving lives, their own and
those of men in the stokeholds. In a sense those who perish may be
said to be unwilling martyrs who by their deaths purchase some
advantage for others. It will be said that it is a great price to
pay for a small advantage, and one which might have been cheaply
gained in some other ways. That is so. But so too the ways of
nature are cruel. So many seeds must be sown, so many young animals
or birds or fishes born, so many must be trampled out of existence,
that only the best may survive. (_Problem of Evil_; pp. 163-4).

That certainly puts all the owners of slum property, all the grasping
shipowners, all those who batten and fatten on other people's welfare in
a most favourable light. We have been thinking them almost criminals
when they were in reality public benefactors. They lead to many
improvements, and even though the improvements come too late to benefit
those who suffer from the evils, yet they do come--sometimes. Certainly
it might give some comfort if the sufferers knew what it was they were
being sacrificed for, and that others would be benefited by their death.
But they do not, and we are therefore bound to conclude that whatever
satisfaction is felt is by those who survive. When a _Titanic_ sinks it
must be the people on shore who see the element of goodness in it since
it makes travelling easier for _them_. And the kindness developed in one
who can excuse the brutalities of nature because it brings some be