hirds, of the persons who were threatened by the
still invisible danger. A steamer that goes to the bottom has
generally fewer passengers on board than would have been the case had
she not been destined to go down. Two trains that collide, an express
that falls over a precipice, &c., carry less travellers than they would
on a day when nothing is going to happen. Should a bridge collapse,
the accident will generally be found to occur, in defiance of all
probability, at the moment the crowd has just left it. In the case of
fires in theatres and other public places, things unfortunately happen
otherwise. But there, as we know, the principal danger does not lie in
the fire, but in the panic of the terror-stricken crowd. Again, a
fire-damp explosion will usually occur at a time when the number of
miners inside the mine is appreciably inferior to the number that would
habitually be there. Similarly, when a powder factory is blown up, the
majority of the workmen, who would otherwise all have perished, will be
found to have left the mill for some trifling, but providential,
reason. So true is this, that the almost unvarying remark, that we
read every day in the papers, has become familiar and hackneyed, as: "A
catastrophe which might have assumed terrible proportions was
fortunately confined, thanks to such and such a circumstance," &c.,
&c.; or, "One shudders to think what might have happened had the
accident occurred a moment sooner, when all the workmen, all the
passengers," &c. Is this the clemency of Chance? We are becoming ever
less inclined to credit it with a personality, with design or
intelligence. There is more reason in the supposition that something
in man has defined the disaster; that an obscure but unfailing instinct
has preserved a great number of people from a danger that was on the
point of taking shape, of assuming the imminent and imperious form of
the inevitable; and that their unconsciousness, taking alarm, is seized
with hidden panic, which manifests itself outwardly in a caprice, a
whim, some puerile and inconsistent incident, that is yet irresistible
and becomes the means of salvation.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Buried Temple, by Maurice Maeterlinck

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