comfort rather than
otherwise. We who but yesterday realised that trusting to luck was a
crime far deadlier in its effects than a mere passionate murder will
to-morrow accommodate ourselves once more to the accidental medley of
life which at least justified itself in letting so many of our fathers
and grandfathers die in their beds.

This accommodation of ourselves to life, it is curious to reflect, is
just the consenting to drift without a star which is condemned by all
the religions. Life is conceived in the religions as a vigilance. If
we are not vigilant, we are damned. It is the same in politics, where
we all quote Burke's sentence about eternal vigilance being the price
of liberty. But religion and politics do not long survive the dessert.
We are as much in love with drowsiness as the lotus-eaters, and at a
seemingly safe distance we are as careless of the ruin of the skies as
Horace's just man. Preachers may tell us once a week that we are
sentinels sleeping at our posts, and, if they say it eloquently
enough, we may possibly raise their salaries. But we have got used to
sleeping at our posts, and what we have got used to, we feel in our
bones, cannot be regarded as a very serious sin. Once, in the fine
wakefulness of our youth, we summoned the world out of its sleep. But
our voices sounded so thin and lonely in the sleep-laden air that we
felt rather ashamed of ourselves, and we soon climbed down out of our
golden balconies and took our places with our brothers among the hosts
of slumber. Upon our slumber, no doubt, there still breaks the
occasional voice of a prophet who persists--who bids us arise and get
ready for the battle, or flee from the wrath to come, or do anything
indeed except acquiesce with a sleepy grunt in the despotism of
disaster. It is to fight against disaster and destruction that we were
born. Our prophets are those who put wakeful hearts in us for the
conflict.

There should perhaps be no prophet needed to belabour us into making
an end of such disasters as have recently taken place in so far as
they are preventable. Even our common-sense, it might be thought,
would be strong enough to insist upon the ordinary rules of caution
being observed in ships and railways, and, though most of us are in
little danger of dying in a pit explosion, even in coal-mines.
Sometimes, when I read the evidence of the cause of a railway
disaster, and find a managing director or someone else in authority
confe