 The Oath and Law of Hippocrates, by Hippocrates. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Read by Clarica. Introductory Note Hippocrates, the celebrated Greek physician, was a contemporary of the historian Herodotus. He was born in the island of Kos between 470 and 460 B.C., and belonged to the family that claimed descent from the mythical Esculapius, son of Apollo. There was already a long medical tradition in Greece before his day, and this he is supposed to have inherited chiefly through his predecessor Herodotus, and he enlarged his education by extensive travel. He is said, though the evidence is unsatisfactory, to have taken part in the efforts to check the Great Plague, which devastated Athens at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. He died at Larissa, between 380 and 360 B.C. The works attributed to Hippocrates are the earliest extant Greek medical writings, but very many of them are certainly not his. Some five or six, however, are generally granted to be genuine, and among these is the famous oath. This interesting document shows that in his time physicians were already organized into a corporation or guild with regulations for the training of disciples, and within a spriticor and professional ideal which, with slight exceptions, can hardly yet be regarded as out of date. One saying occurring in the words of Hippocrates has achieved universal currency, though few who quote it today are aware that it originally referred to the art of the physician. It is the first of his aphorisms. Life is short and the art long, the occasion fleeting, experience fallacious, and judgment difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient the attendants and externals cooperate. The Oath of Hippocrates I swear by Apollo the physician, and Esculapius, and health, and all heel, and all the gods and goddesses, that according to my ability and judgment I will keep this oath and this stipulation, to reckon him who taught me this art equally dear to me as my parents, to share my substance with him and relieve his necessities if required, to look upon his offspring in the same footing as my own brothers, and to teach them this art if they shall wish to learn it, without fee or stipulation, and that by precept, lecture, and every other mode of instruction I will impart a knowledge of the art to my own sons and to those of my teachers, and to disciples bound by a stipulation and oath according to the law of medicine, but to none others. I will follow that system of regimen which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my patients and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous. I will give no deadly medicine to any one if asked, nor suggest any such counsel, and in like manner I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion. With purity and withholdiness I will pass my life and practice my art. I will not cut persons laboring under the stone, but will leave this to be done by men who are practitioners of this work. Into whatever houses I enter I will go into them for the benefit of the sick, and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption, and further, from the seduction of females or males, of freemen and slaves. Whatever in connection with my professional practice, or not in connection with it, I see or hear in the life of men which ought not to be spoken of abroad I will not divulge, as reckoning that all such should be kept secret. While I continue to keep this oath unviolated, may it be granted to me to enjoy life and the practice of the art respected by all men in all times. But should I trespass and violate this oath, may the reverse be my lot. The Law of Hippocrates Medicine is of all the arts the most noble, but owing to the ignorance of those who practice it and of those who inconsiderately form a judgment of them, it is at present far behind all the other arts. Your mistake appears to me to arise principally from this, that in the cities there is no punishment connected with the practice of medicine, and with it alone, except disgrace, and that does not hurt those who are familiar with it. Such persons are like the figures which are introduced in tragedies, for as they have the shape and dress and personal appearance of an actor, but are not actors, so also physicians are many entitled, but very few in reality. Whoever is to acquire a competent knowledge of medicine ought to be possessed of the following advantages—a natural disposition, instruction, a favourable position for the study, early tuition, love of labour, leisure. First of all a natural talent is required, for when nature leads the way to what is most excellent, instruction in the art takes place which the student must try to appropriate to himself by reflection, becoming an early pupil in a place well adapted for instruction. He must also bring to the task a love of labour and perseverance, so that the instruction taking root may bring forth proper and abundant fruits. Instruction in medicine is like the culture of the productions of the earth. Where our natural disposition is, as it were, the soil. The tenants of our teachers are, as it were, the seed. Instruction in youth is like the planting of the seed in the ground at the proper season. The place where the instruction is communicated is like the food imparted to vegetables by the atmosphere. Diligent study is like the cultivation of the fields, and it is time which imparts strength to all things, and brings them to maturity. Having brought all these requisites to the study of medicine, and having acquired a true knowledge of it, we shall thus, in travelling through the cities, be esteemed physicians not only in name, but in reality. But inexperience is a bad treasure, and a bad fund to those who possess it, whether in opinion or reality, being devoid of self-reliance and contentedness, and the nurse both of timidity and audacity, for timidity betrays a want of powers and audacity, a lack of skill. They are indeed two things, knowledge and opinion, of which the one makes its possessor really to know, the other to be ignorant. Those things which are sacred are to be imparted only to sacred persons, and it is not lawful to impart them to the profane until they have been initiated in the mysteries of the science. Oathen Law of Hippocrates by Hippocrates On the pleasure of taking up one's pen, by Heller Balak. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Among the sadder and smaller pleasures of this world, I count this pleasure, the pleasure of taking up one's pen. It has been said by very many people that there is a tangible pleasure in the mere act of writing, in choosing and arranging words. It has been denied by many. It is affirmed and denied in the life of Dr. Johnson, and for my part I would say that it is very true in some rare moods and holy false and most others. However, of writing and the pleasure in it, I am not writing here with pleasure, but of the pleasure of taking up one's pen, which is quite another matter. Note what the action means. You are alone. Even if the room is crowded, as was the smoking room in the GWR hotel at Paddington only the other day when I wrote my Statistical Abstract of Christendom, even if the room is crowded, you must have made yourself alone to be able to write at all. You must have built up some kind of wall and isolated your mind. You are alone then, and that is the beginning. If you consider at what pains men are to be alone, how they climb mountains, enter prisons, profess monastic vows, put on eccentric daily habits, and seclude themselves in the garrets of a great town, you will see that this moment of taking up the pen is not least happy in the fact that then, by a mere association of ideas, the writer is alone. So much for that. Now, not only are you alone, but you are going to create. When people say create, they flatter themselves. No man can create anything. I knew a man once who drew a horse on a bit of paper to amuse the company and covered it all over with many parallel streaks as he drew. When he had done this, an aged priest, present upon that occasion, said, You are pleased to draw a zebra. When the priest said this, the man began to curse and to swear and to protest that he had never seen or heard of a zebra. He said it was all done out of his own head, and he called heaven to witness, and his patron saint for he was of the old English territorial Catholic families, his patron saint was Athelstan, and the salvation of his immortal soul he also staked, that he was as innocent of zebras as the babe unborn, but there he persuaded no one, and the priest scored. It was most evident that the territorial was crammed full of zebraical knowledge. All this then is a digression, and it must be admitted that there is no such thing as a man's creating, but anyhow, when you take up your pen, you do something devilish-pleasing. There is a prospect before you. You are going to develop a germ. I don't know what it is, and I promise you I won't call it creation, but possibly a God is creating through you, and at least you are making belief at creation. Now it is a sense of mastery and of origin, and you know that when you have done something will be added to the world and little destroyed. For what will you have destroyed or wasted? A certain amount of white paper or a farthing, a square yard, and I am not certain it is not pleasant or all diversified and variegated with black wriggles. A certain amount of ink meant to be spread and dried, made for no other purpose. A certain infinitesimal amount of quill, torn from the silly goose for no other purpose but to minister to the high needs of man. Here you cry, affectation, affectation, how do I know that the fellow writes with a quill a most unlikely habit? To that I answer you are right. Less assertion, please, and more humility. I will tell you frankly with what I am writing. I am writing with the Waterman's ideal fountain pen. The nib is of pure gold, as was the throne of Charlemagne and the song of Rowland. That throne, I need hardly tell you, was born into Spain across the cold and off the passes of the Pyrenees by no less than a hundred and twenty mules, and all the western world adored it, and trembled before it when it was set up at every halt under pine trees on the upland grasses. For he sat upon it, dreadful and commanding. There weighed upon him two centuries of age. His brows were level with justice and experience, and his beard was so tangled and full that he was called Bramble-Bearded Charlemagne. You have read how, when he stretched out his hand at evening, the sun stood still till he had found the body of Rowland, no? You must read about these things. Well then the pen is of pure gold, a pen that runs straight away like a willing horse or a jolly little ship. Indeed it is a pen so excellent that it reminds me of my subject, the pleasure of taking up one's pen. God bless you, pen. When I was a boy and they told me work was honorable, useful, cleanly, sanitary, wholesome, and necessary to the mind of man, I paid no more attention to them than if they had told me that public men were usually honest or that pigs could fly. It seemed to me that they were merely saying silly things they had been told to say. Nor do I doubt to this day that those who told me these things at school were but preaching a dull and careless round. But now I know that the things they told me were true. God bless you, pen of work, pen of drudgery, pen of letters, pen of posings, pen rabid, pen ridiculous, pen glorified, pray little pen, be worthy of the love I bear you, and consider how noble I shall make you some day. When you shall live in a glass case with a crowd of tourists drowned you every day from ten to four, pen of justice, pen of the savi indignatio, pen of majesty and of light, I will write with you some day a considerable poem. It is a compact between you and me. If I cannot make one of my own, then I will write out some other man's. But you, pen, come what may, shall write out a good poem before you die, if it is only the Allegro. The pleasure of taking up one's pen has also this, peculiar among all pleasures, that you have the freedom to lay it down when you will. Not so with love, not so with victory, not so with glory. Had I begun the other way around, I would have called this work the pleasure of laying down one's pen. But I began it where I began it, and I am going to end it just where it is going to end. What other occupation, avocation, dissertation, or intellectual recreation can you cease at will? Not bridge. You go on playing to win. Not public speaking, they ring a bell. Not mere converse. You have to answer everything the other insufficient person says. Not life, for it is wrong to kill oneself, and as for the natural end of living, that does not come by one's choice. On the contrary, it is the most capricious of all accidents. But the pen you lay down when you will. At any moment, without remorse, without anxiety, without dishonor, you are free to do this dignified and final thing. I am just going to do it. You lay it down. End of On the Pleasure of Taking Up One's Pen by Hilaire Balak Read by Neal Donnelly On the Vice of Novel Reading by Yung E. Allison This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. On the Vice of Novel Reading, Being a Brief in Appeal, Pointing at Errors of the Lower Tribunal Paper Read Before the Western Association of Writers at Winona Park, Indiana, June 29, 1897 by Yung E. Allison Ever since the novel reached the stage of development where it was demonstrated to be the most ingenious vehicle yet designed for conveying the protein thought and fancy of man, there has stood in the judgment book of public opinion the decree that novel reading was a vice. Of course that judgment did not apply exclusively to the reading of novels. It was a sort of supplementary decree in which the name of this new invention was specifically added to the list of moral beguilements against which that judgment had anciently stood. Poetry, the drama, even the virtuous history, had had their noses disjointed by this tribunal, but their great age and the familiarity of their presence had softened the decree in its enforcement. The novel was a young offender in aspect, though he had the nature and inheritance of the other three, and was besides strong in masculinity and virility, a certain sympathy that sprung up for the three quaint old ladies, as for old offenders whose persistence had won the wink of toleration. They actually achieved a certain facetious respectability in comparison with the fresher and more active dangers afforded by the novel. But the novel was simply a combination of all three, more flexible and adaptable. State therefore merely shares in the old judgment directed against everything in literature and in all the arts that displays the seductiveness of fancy or taste. The judgments of public opinion have been consistently in the line of distrusting and discrediting, everything that appeared to be purely spiritual and intellectual, and that could not at once be organized into a political or religious institution or into a mechanical industry with the prospect of large sales and quick profits. Your reading is a vice, then, under this judgment, just as the reading of all fictions, fancies, inventions and romances in all their forms, poetic, dramatic, and narrative. And if the reading is a vice, the writing of them, in all common sense, can be no less than murder or arson. If it is a vice to devote time to the reading of novels, it must be a crime to professionally pander to and profit by the vice. And if all this is true, what a wonderfully attractive corner that must be in Hades, their old Homer, and the every-young Aristophanes, Sophocles, and a skiless Dante, Virgil, and Boccacio, Shakespeare, and Molière, Goethe, and Hugo, Balzac, and Thackeray, Scott, and Numa, Dickens, and that wonderful child of Bohemia, who lately lay down to rest on Valima Mountain. Think of all these marvelous eons of genius gathered together for their meat punishment. In one especially warm corner, perhaps, Lopee-Félix de Vaga, the most incorrigible of all, slowly expiating upon some most ingeniously uncomfortable gridiron the 1,160 volumes of crime and vice that are to be set down against him in the indictment if it be a true bill. We may wonder whether the unknown authors of Esther and the Song of Songs and the psychological novel of Job are there, too, where they properly belong. It must be a great Congress with these chief criminals as the senators, and a lower house made up of the most agreeably vicious souls of earth, who in their sojourn here yielded for a moment to siren voices. If everything in fiction, from the astonishing conspiracies overthrown by old sluth, to the magnificent visions that old John Milton saw, of incarnate ambition like a branded criminal driven out before the radiant hosts of heaven, if all the fiction that makes up the spirit of the novel is included in this index expurgatorious of eternity, then we may well have a doubt, my friends, whether hell can hold us all. It is a curious exercise for persons immersed in writing and study as an occupation, and possessing a Catholic tolerance for all occupations, to hark back to the time when they were still within the jurisdiction of the world that acts but does not study. In all the average towns, hamlets and countryside of the world, human nature beats with exactly the same pulse. If a change come, it comes slowly, and it changes altogether, so that all are still alike. In the small towns, novel reading has been considered about as contemptuously as playing the fiddle, though admitted to be less dangerous than family card-playing. It was estimated that a novel reader was confirming his indolence, and in danger of coming to the poor house. A fiddler was prophesized to get into jail for vagrancy or larceny, while a card-player had entered a path that might lead as far as the gallows and comprehend all the crimes. This opinion still largely exists in towns and countryside. We find it maintaining itself even in large cities, among all sorts of very good people, even among the most exceptional men of business, of the professions and of the pulpits. Novel reading as a mental vice, according to this opinion, may be compared with opium eating as a moral vice. It is thought to enervate and corrupt by a means of a luxurious excitement purely fictitious and temporary. At an annual meeting of members of the public library of a large city, the librarian read the aggregate number of calls for books of each class during the year. Let us assume that there were calls for 65,000 works of fiction, 5,000 of history and biography, 2,000 of science and philosophy, and, say, 75 of theology. One of the trustees, who had pretensions as to responsibility for the public conscience that would have dwarfed the pyramid of Cheops, arose and appealed to the members to suggest a plan for counteracting the deplorable tenancy of the times to the reading of fiction. It did not occur to anybody to recommend the abolition of the printing press, and so a discussion began. One of the most distinguished and scholarly ministers and educators of the world who was a member came to the rescue of the novel. He said in substance that the large majority of the men and women in the world were laborers for the bread they ate, and it was his opinion that when such persons were resting after the day's toil, indulging their leisure, it was impossible to expect them to read works on theology and the abstract sciences, while it was natural for them to seek amusement in novels and romances. He thought reading novels was much better than idle gossip or loitering in saloons or in the streets. His remarks were received with great applause, and this declaration of his liberality of opinion was widely commented upon. But is there any real liberality in considering the reading of novels as only just a better use of one's leisure time than gossiping, guzzling in saloons, or wandering idly about the streets? The idea that novel reading has no value except as a relaxation and amusement is born of the same dense and narrow ignorance which concludes that alcoholic drinks and wine serve no real purpose but to promote drunkenness and wife-beating, that opium promotes only luxurious debauchery, and that all the elegant, graceful and beautiful ceremonies and customs of society are invented merely to amuse and gratify the vain selfishness of the rich. The most curious aspect of novel reading, considered as a vice, is that the great majority of those indulging in it, like those who indulge in drinking, gambling, and other vices, are themselves willing to admit that it is indefensible if less perilous than other vices. They excuse it, just as the distinguished minister did, as an amusement so harmless, as compared with other vices, that you may indulge in it and yet skirt Hellfire by a margin of a million miles. Some hypocrites conceal and deny the indulgence, like your secret toper. Others apologize for not indulging when they are in the company of notorious but pleasing offenders, as the hypocrite feigns benevolence. Every one of you doubtless has in mind the amiable man of business, maybe your tailor, your broker, your banker, your lawyer, your grocer, who cultivates your good opinion and for the sake of the customer in you, tolerates lightly the doubtfulness of your employment. He will even introduce the subject of books as a respectful and diplomatic concession to your heresies, much as all of us humor lunatics amably and curiously by broaching the subject of their delusions. He is tolerant because of fat success. His income is large. He spends it in a fine house full of costly adornments, of which he has no knowledge except in the measure of cost and the correctness of their usage. He has equipages and gives dinners and sits securely in Abraham's bosom of society. He pays you the deferential compliment of asking what books you are reading. It may be you are just out of the profound philosophical complexities and pathetic problems of Les Miserables. Perhaps you have immersed yourself again in the paradoxes of vanity fair, or have been pumping up the flabby tires of your better nature, with the fresh air of David Copperfield. It is possible that tests of the Durbervilles, or a window in thrums, has been newly received, and has been enlightening your mind and conscience as to your relations to the world about you. Whatever it has been, you suggest the fact. Is it a novel? He replies doubtfully. Certainly you respond with enthusiasm. A masterpiece. Well, protest the amiable Philistine, I have so little time for amusing myself, you know. My daughter now, she is a great novel reader. She buys a great many novels. Last year I read a book called The Greatness of Our Country. It is a wonderful book. It said in that book that the United States could support a population of four hundred million. I had no idea of that before. I asked Professor so-and-so about it. And he said why not? That China had four hundred million people. It is surprising what we learn from books, etc., etc., etc. This man has got one bold statistical suggestion in his head, out of a book that is made to sell on trains. He recognizes it. It recalls dimly mathematics which he was taught at school. It is a concrete suggestion. It requires no effort to understand or remember. It is so wonderful to him that he has no time to amuse himself with the heart allegories and the practical questions of the condition of those possible four hundred million, as revealed in Les Miserables. His daughter will do that, and he buys for her novels, bicycles, gloves, and chocolates with equal fond readiness to humor what he considers whims pardonable in children. The idea that novel reading is a harmless and mere amusement expresses fully the judgment that it is a vice and encourager of indolence. There may be two reasons for the judgment. One existing in the novel itself, the other in the tribunal. Let us first consider the nature of the tribunal. The supreme constitutive authority, not only of affairs in this life but in the ordering of all the future existences that man has conceived, is public opinion. Public opinion is the decree of human nature, determined in imprenetrable secrecy, enforced with ceremonious and bewildering circumlocution. It is thus double-natured. The organized public opinion that we see, hear, feel, and obey is the costumed officialism of human nature, through ages of custom charged with enforcing upon individuals the demands of the many. The other is that tacit and nearly always unconscious understanding among men and women, which binds them in mysterious cohesion through a belief in or a dread of something that they cannot understand, because they cannot feel it in their hands, control it with their strength, or disturb it with their threats. The myriads of mankind in this secret tribunal are silent, because they are ignorant of speech. They are dull of brain and low in nervous organization, so that perception with them is a cerebral agony, and even feeling responds only to the shock of actual physical suffering. Organized public opinion, when compared with this unnameable and resistless silent force of human instinct, is like a small body of the police in the presence of a vast sullen mob. If the mob is determined and throws capable leaders forward, the police either desert to the mob or disappear. If the mob does not understand itself and produces no leaders, the police rule it. It is fair to speak of this tacit common instinct as ignorant, because the world always has been shared between ignorance and his twin brother, indolence. Knowledge is the rarest coin that circulates among men. No one can accumulate knowledge unless he possesses the broad catholocity of purpose to labor ceaselessly for truth, to accept it from whatsoever source it comes, in whatsoever guise, with whatsoever message it brings him, and to abide whatsoever result may follow. If he expects an angel, and a devil comes, it is still the truth he is seeing, it is still knowledge he is gaining. The genius of knowledge-seeking was glorified in that obscure German chemist who, experimenting upon himself with a new solution, into which a fatal wrong ingredient had entered, cried in the agony of death to his assistant, know to my symptoms carefully and make an autopsy, I am sure it is a new poison we have liberated. If the vast majority of men shrink from and evade irksome labor with their muscles, even though life and comfort depend upon it, a still vaster majority shirk the disciplined toil and tension of the mind which, if it have a real purpose, makes little of the only rewards that spur men to muscular labor. The men who have really thought and labored, and struggled for the abstract jewel of truth, and to beautify and make happy the world we live in, are to the masses of indolent, ignorant, selfish human beings that have swarmed through the ages as parasites upon some huge animal. The mass of humanity considered as a whole, separated from these restless and stinging parasites, observed through the perspective of history, tradition, and science, resembles nothing so much as some monstrous, dull-brained and gloomy animal, alternately dozing and raging through the centuries, now as if stupefied in its own bulk, and then as if furious with the madness of brute power. In fact, though mankind have achieved the dignity of a history that fills the thoughtful with wonder, yet as a mass they are filled with as much violence, injustice, ruthlessness, and as if it were but yesterday they had emerged from the primitive struggles with wild beasts, the tangled forests, the trackless mountains, and the pitiless elements, and yet stood flushed with savage exultation, but dull with physical weariness. In that vast human bulk that sprawls over every continent, the primitive ferocity still exists, veiled perhaps under familiar livery and uniform, but untamed by centuries of training. It is this gloomy mass, saturated with superstitious cowardice, savage with the selfish instinct of greed, or dull with the languor of gorged and exhausted passion, that deliberates not in words or thought, but in some impenetrable free masonry of instinct, like that which beggars illustrate when they silently display their deformities and mutilations as the most eloquent appeals. This gloomy mass is that once the instigator and the instrument of mortal destiny, individuals may escape for a time, but they must eventually fall or lift the mass to meet them. The most profound philosophers and most patient students know as little of this silent gloomy human force as geographers know of the archipelagos of the Antarctic. The philosopher begins with pure reason and expands it. The student delves into the records of other students. In unfathomable depths below both are the myriads who eat, drink, sleep, and seek their prey, as their primitive parents once did when they disputed carcasses with the beasts of the forests. It is this gloomy, savage force that has made the contemplative soul of spiritual inquiry writhe under the startling contradictions of history. When this force has been aroused with fear, it has snarled and roared defiance. When it has been enraged by opposition or the lash of mastership, it has cooled its ferocity in the blood of countless wars, pillages, and sacrifices. When satiated or pleased it has grunted with pleasure, or relaxed itself in orgies so gross and unspeakable that modern history with instinctive decency has kept the story of them veiled behind dead languages. This gloomy, savage force has always been the same whether mastered or mastering. When some daring and cunning genius of its own nature has counted, as the Alexanders, Caesars, and Napoleons have done, it has marched out to slaughter and be slaughtered with a sullen pride in the daring that this mightier ferocity has put upon it. When it has mastered its drusus, its Domitian, its Nero, its Vespacian, and its Louis XVI, it has indulged in wanted excesses of rage and destruction until, spent with exhaustion, a new master has arisen to tie it up like a whipped dog. It was this gloomy and savage force that crowded into the greatest tribunal of all history, and yelled with discordant and frenzied rage into the very face of the noblest and gentlest incarnation of spiritual light that ever spent its brief moment on earth. Crucify him, release unto us barbarous the thief. It was this savage force, serving all masters with equal ferocious zeal that Theodosius turned against Serapion at Alexandria in the name of Christianity, to blot out of existence the inestimable treasures of knowledge and literature that had been accumulated by centuries of labor. At all times this gloomy force has been more wantonly cruel than wild beasts. Man has been epigramatically described as a reasoning animal, a laughing animal, a constructive animal, and even as an animal that gets drunk. But the truest description is that he is the cruel and rapacious animal. The greatest student of the jungle, who has written of the beast of the forest with the intuition of genius, has given us this formula. Now this is the law of the jungle, as old and as true as the sky, and the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die. Ye may kill for yourselves and your mates and your cubs, as they need and ye can, but kill not for pleasure of killing, and seven times never kill man. You may spend the remainder of your life attacking that formula of animal nature, if you please, but you will find it at last still truth. Man kills not only the beast, but his own species for pleasure, or in sheer wantonness of cruelty. He loves killing as an exercise. He loves it as a spectacle. He loves it as the origin of his greatest emotion. When that there is merely a brutal criminal to be hanged, human beings crowd the converging roads to the spectacle as centuries ago they crowded to the Coliseum, and it is to be recorded to the credit of wild beasts that no traveller ever yet came upon a battlefield that they had strewn with the dead bodies of their own kind. Lest it be contended that this is a psychological portrait of the mass of mankind caricatured by bitter cynicism, let us examine the aspect of its physiology. The whole brain of an average Caucasian makes up fifty ounces of the one hundred forty pounds weight of his body. There are thus one hundred thirty seven pounds of fleshy necessity to three pounds of intellectual possibility, forty six parts of heavy dough to one part of leaven. The difference in the brain weight of races and which decides the question of intellectual superiority is about two ounces. The difference in the brain weight of individuals of the same race indicating mental superiority is about two ounces. Now as the brains of individuals of all races must in proportion be equally occupied with the execution of those functions which we call instinct and those acts that may be called merely automobile since they are the results of training in constant imitation and have utterly no relation to intellectuality or mental initiative, it may be fairly assumed that the spiritual essence of races and individuals exists in a little grayish pulp-like lump of brain weighing two ounces out of an average bodily weight of one hundred forty pounds. In the mass of humanity then there is one part possible to flower into the noble perceptions of spiritual and intellectual life to one thousand one hundred and twenty parts of dull uniform automatic animalism. What chance has this solitary microbe of spiritual and intellectual light against the swarming bacteria of animalism? That single microbe is merely a possibility. It may be mutilated, it may be dwarfed, it may fail from weakness, it may be corrupted. It is discouraging to think how few have grown into strong life through all the perils of existence. Under these circumstances it is but natural that even the small proportion of mankind endowed with the divine possibilities conferred by two ounces of brain should be contaminated with many of the corruptions from below. Of those who seem to be concerned with spiritual perceptions there is a vast number mere charlatans and pretenders who, like the ingenious Japanese, are content to make cunning imitations of the real things adapted to sell to the best advantage. They patter formulas of religion, of science, of art and morals, and ostentatiously display themselves in the costume of intellectuality to flatter, cajole, and mystify the gloomy ignorance of their fellows. This is the select officialism of the secret human nature, its recognized and authorized police, the constituted authorities of public opinion. It is among these that we shall find the possibilities of development much increased. What do we find? That the solitary microbe merely begins its struggle here. It dare not destroy its swarming enemies, since upon their continued existence its own life depends. It must regulate, control, and direct them if it would live and develop, or with cowardly cunning compromise the struggle at the outset and become a servant where it seems to command. This is the first terrorist step of superiority, peopled by those who can understand others above them and interpret to the mass below. The microbe that might have become glorious ounces of brain has been content to become merely a little wart of pulp that finds expression in skill and quickness and more of coveted leisure. There is the next higher terrace and another and another, until finally it becomes a pyramid, ever more fragile and symmetrical, the apex of which is a delicate spire, where the purest intellects are elevated to an ever-increasing height and ever-decreasing numbers, until in the dizzy altitude above the groveling base below, they are wrapped little by little in the cold solitude of incarnate genius, burning like suns with their own essence. It is so far up that the eyes deceive, and men dispute who it is that stands at the top, but whoever he may be, he has carried by the force of strength, determination, and patient will the whole swarm of his evil bacteria with him. They swarm through every terrace below, increasing in force as the pyramid enlarges downward. It is the primital bulk of human nature with its finest brain, true to anatomic principles at the top. That radiance at the summit is the delight and the aspiration of all below. As it rises as slowly as growth of a coral reef, it increases the courage of those below in proportion as they are near. But the whole bulk is alive with the bacteria of animalism, under increasing control as it rises, still with the ferocity, rapacity, and selfish passions of the gloomy mass at the bottom, and forever in revolt. Is this not proved by history, written and unwritten? Is it not proved by the ghastly secrets of individual introspection that men never reveal or admit to others, secrets guarded by a system of conventions so impenetrable and vast that to attempt to personalize it in the sneaking figure of hypocrisy would be as absurd as to try to enlarge the significance of an ivory chessman by setting it up on a lady's jewel box and naming it Malak? All men feel how much of them is brute and how much is reason, but it is the unimpartable secret of human society whose betrayal has been rendered impossible by universal denials in advance and acted into what we call criminal laws under which admissions are denied by the brand of proportionate infamies to demonstrate that the traitor who has acted or spoken has not put into expression the secrets of the mass. Great armies and constable areas are kept to commit upon a large scale the murders and violence which, when committed upon a small scale, they punish. What is the record of the officialism of public opinion? There has been nothing so abhorrent and cruel, so sordid, mean, frivolous, indecent or insane, that the representative fashion and respectability of some splendid civilization has not justified, approved, and sustained it. It has licensed every wanton passion of the body. It has even indulged contemptuously at times. Those individuals inspired through the mysterious selection of immortal genius to safeguard the slender flame of spiritual light and life. But those indulged have always been made to feel that they were secure only as long as their performances excited jaded appetites as a novelty. If dwarfs and monstrosities staled, if dancing girls paled, if gladiators wearied, if there were no new games invented then bring in a poet or artist some queer fellow who had discovered something that he called truth or beauty and let him amuse. But if he does not amuse or if he wear out his welcome away with him. In the history of our own civilization as our ideals go, there was one divine incarnation of spiritual and intellectual life that struggled through the tears, blood, and dirt of existence without one stain upon the purity of his nature. This essence was a beacon light that has shown steadily through nearly two thousand years, and him the officialism of human nature, an exultation of savage contempt, nailed upon a cross, and set up for an ominous warning to the whole world. It had already marked the noble Socrates, and like Cleopatra to her slave, handed him a cup of poison. It was afterward to compel Galileo to swallow in shame and agony his testimony to unalterable truth. Even in this year, under the title of a great church, it has with pitiless persistence forced a great student and educator not to deny a historical fact that he had discovered, but to humbly regret its promulgation, as if the concealment of a truth for your advantage in moral controversy were not a greater crime than the concealment of a murderer for pay. Whenever this officialism has concluded to amuse itself with spiritual inquiries in the name of religious controversies, it has conducted them with fire and the sword, with thumbscrews and the boot, an all manner of ingenious ferocity. The officialism of public opinion has always been ready to serve the demands of the base nature below. It was the great law-giver, Lycurgus, who taught Spartan use the commercial economy of theft and the virtue and advantage of lying. It was not only when Rome was in decay, but when she was at the zenith of glory from the first Brutus to Octavius, when Caesar, Cicero, Seneca, Horace, and the Plinies lived at the seat of the knowledge, wealth, art, and power of the world, that women crowded the Colosseums to feast their senses upon the ferocity of tigers and give the death signal to the gladiator who charmed by his fatal skill. It was while Shakespeare lived that English gentlemen and mothers apprenticed their son to the trade of piracy. In our own century and country we have seen Abraham Lincoln, the liberator himself, enlist under the flag of official public opinion to strike a blow in the extermination of red Indians who had committed the unpardonable crime of owning their own land whereupon we are assembled today. The fashions of lust and cruelty may change with the amusements they permit, but officialism promotes all with zeal. At present we laugh at mesmer and study hypnotism. At present we sneer at the incarnations of Vishnu and inquire into theosophy. At present we condemn the sacrificial great custom of King Prempah and order our killings by twelve men in the sheriff and by elaborate machinery. At present we shudder at the sports of comatose and wait breathlessly upon bulletins from Carson City. Those who scattered the fetishes of Dahomey have waited on their knees in the cathedral at Naples for the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius or crawled in agony of hope to the saving pool at Lord's. There have been those melted to tenderest compassion at the sight of a wounded dog or an overdriven horse who have yet owned human slaves and contended that it was right, even if harsh, to sell a mother and her child from one auction block to different owners. There have been those so wounded by the shortcomings of their neighbors that they have organized white-cap bands of virtue to wipe out immorality in the cleansing blood of murder. A man may reject the miracle of Jonah and yet see an airship. Now this is the tribunal that has handed down the judgment that novel reading is a vice. Is it not a most natural, just, and honest opinion? Could such a tribunal properly pronounce any other? Is it not such a judgment, in fact, as vindicates the integrity of the court, while it crowns the culprit with glory? In expressing the idea that the reading of novels is only an amusement, to be taken up when there is nothing else to do, your average grocer, tailor, lawyer, or whatnot has but spoken to you the world's judgment. In fact, there are countless readers of novels who have grown up in this atmosphere of conviction that novels are meant only to amuse. They are so habituated to the idea that novels, to them, are valueless, mere sentimental unrealities, or spiced narratives of heated invention, so that they go through the treasure houses of genius without ever hearing the soft-voice persuasion of knowledge, or seeing the marvelous, vivid panorama of human life, illustrating its aspirations, sorrows, struggles, triumphs, and failures. Such readers convinced in advance that everything in a novel is fictitious, because the personages discussed are fictitious in name. Never dream that study of the conduct of these personages may be useful to influence their own manners, conduct, morals, or sympathies. Indeed, some of them are so confident of the unreality of novels, that when they are confronted with their own counterparts in fictitious personality, they feel a certain sense of humiliation, as of being convicted of eccentricity, of an unlikeness to actual persons, which must be concealed as branding them fit to be put into a novel. To such person's novel reading is a vice, because it is an indolent excitement, a mental opium-eating, the useless budding against an unscalable wall, of brains intended to be fully occupied in developing those parts of the nervous and muscular systems that find their highest application in vigorous devotion to the washboard, or the laying of gas pipes down. What a different result is achieved by the reader who knows the secret, that imagination is the soul of thought, that taste is the power of truth, and that the abstractions produced by imagination and taste, dealing with fact to convert it to fiction, or carefully assembling fiction to convert it to fact, have been the stars that have lighted up the night of human history. By the light of these in their varying forms, man discovered religion, philosophy, science, government, and the possibility of orderly liberty. To such a reader the novel comprehends all human society, its customs and secrets. The untraveled man may sit in his library and become as familiar with the world as with his native town. The diffident student may mingle familiarly in the society of courts. The bashful girl may learn the most engaging manners. The slow may learn the trick of wit. The rich may learn sympathy for the poor. The weak may be warned against the pitfalls of temptation, and every one may there survey himself in every aspect subjected to discussion and exhibition under various disguises and under various circumstances. And if he have courage and the desire, he can decide what he thinks of himself and the possibilities of improving the opinion in the light of full knowledge of the subject. The novel has come as the solvent of all literary art. In its possibilities all the essentials of other literary forms are combined and conveyed without injury. Professedly not history, it performs all its wonders in the guise of history, and adds a light and a human interest to chronicle that gives increased value. We do not get sympathetic and human knowledge of England from history, but from Scott, Zachary, and her splendid historical novelist. We do not turn to Guizot and Thierre for any knowledge of French history except its stated public facts, its documents with royal seals, and its verified dates and details. It is to Dumois, Melromy, Balzac, that all but the professional students of history go. We do not seek in the rapid sketches of Gibbon for the story of Nero, but in the pages of Quo Vadis. Where do we find the breathing history of Spain except in the countless novels that its picturesque subjects have suggested? I would scorn to underestimate the profound and substantial value that the great muse of history has conferred upon the world. In all literature she deservedly ranks first in dignity, power, and usefulness. But who will say that at her court the Prime Minister is not the novel, which by its lightness, grace, and address has popularized history all over the world? While the novel has none of the guise of poetry, yet it has its every essence, neglecting only form and rhyme. In the novel you may find the measure, the accent, and the figures of the whole range of poetry, and a capacity for inspiring enthusiasm and emulation quite as great as poetry unjoined to the divine enchantress, music. Plainly not drama, yet what is more dramatic than the novel? In the miracle of its pages you find theatre, scenery, actors, audience, and author. You may sit at your ease in your library chair and command the services of the most innumerable company of comedians, tragedians, lovers, ladies, buffoons, subrets, and pantomimus that the world ever knew. How many novels have been turned into dramas? How few dramas have been successfully expanded into novels? Thus the novel, while it is not history nor poetry nor the drama, is a combination of all, and it possesses more than this. Its lightness enables it to tell the history of the commonest peasant, a subject that history disdained until the novel bent to the task. Its flexibility makes it possible to write the history of types and classes. Its capacity enables it to convey science, to teach morals, to illuminate the abstract difficulties of every philosophy, to utter the despairing human protests stifled elsewhere, and to embrace every purpose for which words were created and human aspirations were kindled. That it has lent itself to base uses is true. How could it escape the contamination that has smirched every other art? And as in every other art, that which is base and false in fiction, soon dies of its own inherent weakness and is forgotten. But decade by decade the novel grows more powerful, more noble, and more adaptable to the spiritual uses of man. The time will come when the novel will stand on the bookshelves with history, the philosophies and the sciences, as of equal honor and use, necessary to complete the education of every scholar. But even then there will probably be a tribunal to pronounce it to be, if not a vice, at least of doubtful utility. End of On the Vice of Novel Reading by Young E. Allison. Rules for Bathing by E. P. Miller M.D. from the Scientific American, July 3, 1869. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Rules for Bathing. One, baths should not be taken within at least one hour before eating, nor within two hours after, and not within two hours before and three hours after is still better. The reason for this is that in bathing, the blood is brought to the surface in large quantities and circulates freely in the capillaries of the skin, being drawn away from internal organs and generally diffused to the whole body, and the more freely this external circulation and warmth is kept up, the more refreshing and invigorating the bath becomes and the greater the benefit derived from it. Whereas when the stomach has recently been supplied with food, the blood is diverted from the external circulation to the digestive organs to supply the secretions and juices necessary to carry on the digestive process. From these facts it will be evident that if food be taken into the stomach too soon after a bath, the blood is directed to the stomach before a full reaction has taken place, thus interfering with its beneficial effects. While on the other hand, if the bath be taken too soon after a meal, the blood is diverted from the digestive organs before digestion is completed, and thus a very important function of the body is interfered with. In cases of active congestion or inflammation, in fevers or in severe pain and distress, it may be necessary to make water applications irrespective of this rule. 2. The head and face should be thoroughly bathed at the commencement of every bath. This will prevent the rushing of blood to the head and ward off unpleasant sensations. 3. A bath should never be taken when the body is exhausted or too greatly fatigued by exercise, as a person in such a condition would not be likely to secure the proper reaction and warmth. Moderate exercise before a bath is usually beneficial, as it accelerates the circulation and secures a comfortable degree of warmth, which is always desirable before taking a bath. There is no danger from taking a general bath while in a perspiration, providing no fatigue accompanies it. For the sits and foot baths, however, it is better that the body be warm but not perspiring. 4. All general baths should be taken briskly, and the bather himself, if able, should rub vigorously that he may quicken his circulation and respiration, and thus secure the warmth and glowing reaction that is so essential after every bath. This should be observed not only while in the bath, but in rubbing dry after it. 5. For drying the body after a general bath, a strong linen or cotton sheet is much better than towels. This should be for an adult at least two yards square so as to envelop the whole body like a cloak, and with it he should be rubbed or rub himself till thoroughly dry. By using the sheet for wiping, the body is protected from the air, the escape of heat is prevented, and there is much less liability to feel chilly afterwards. Towels will suffice, however, for all local applications. 6. At the completion of the bath, the bather should immediately dress, and, if able, exercise in the open air or engage in some active employment. If not able to exercise, it is well to cover up warm in bed for an hour or so and sleep, if possible. 7. Very nervous persons or those whose digestion is much impaired or circulation is imperfect and feeble, or temperature is below the normal standard, should be careful not to use cold water to any great extent in bathing. It may have a temporary beneficial effect, but in the end their sufferings will be likely to be increased. 8. Feeble envelopes, consumptives, persons subject to hemorrhage of the lungs of the stomach, those who have just passed the crisis in fevers or other acute diseases, those suffering from profuse discharges, such as separations, diarrhea, cholera, etc., and also females during the menstrual period, should avoid the use of cold water as well as the excessive use of it in any form. 9. Ways use a thermometer to determine the temperature of baths for invalids. 10. An invalid should not bathe in a room with a temperature below 70 degrees and for most persons, 80 degrees or 85 degrees would be better, provided there is good ventilation. End of Rules for Bathing by E. P. Miller M.D. Read by Leanne Howlett. The works of Benjamin Franklin. Theme 1, Chapter 15, Self-Denial, Not the Essence of Virtue by Benjamin Franklin. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Read by Daniel Cranston. Self-Denial, Not the Essence of Virtue. It is commonly asserted that without self-denial, there is no virtue, and that the greater the self-denial, the greater the virtue. If it were said that he who cannot deny himself anything he inclines to, though he knows it will be to his hurt, as not the virtue of resolution or fortitude, it would be intelligent enough. But as it stands, it seems obscure or erroneous. Let us consider some of the virtues singly. If a man has no inclination to wrong people in his dealings, if he feels no temptation to it and therefore never does it, can it be said that he is not a just man? If he is a just man, has he not the virtue of justice? If to a certain man idle diversions have nothing in them that is tempting, and therefore he never relaxes his application to business for their sake, is he not an industrious man? Or has he not the virtue of industry? I might, in like manner, instance in all the rest of the virtues. But to make the thing short, as it is certain that the more we strive against the temptation to any vice and practice the contrary virtue, the weaker will that temptation be, and the stronger will be that habit. Till at length, the temptation has no force or entirely vanishes. Does it follow from thence that in our endeavors to overcome vice, we grow continually less and less virtuous? Till at length, we have no virtue at all? If self-denial be the essence of virtue, then it follows that the man who is naturally temperate, just, et cetera, is not virtuous, but that in order to be virtuous, he must, in spite of his natural inclination, wrong his neighbors, and eat and drink, et cetera, to excess. But perhaps it may be said that by the word virtue in the above assertion is meant merit, and so it should stand thus. Without self-denial, there is no merit, and the greater the self-denial, the greater the merit. The self-denial here meant must be when our inclinations are towards vice, or else it would still be nonsense. By merit is understood dessert. And when we say a man merits, we mean that he deserves praise or reward. We do not pretend to merit anything of God, for he is above our services. And the benefits he confers on us are the effects of his goodness and bounty. All our merit, then, is with regard to one another, and from one to another. Taking, then, the assertion, as it last stands, for man does me a service from a natural, benevolent inclination, does he deserve less of me than another, who does me the like-kindness against his inclination? If I have two journeymen, one naturally industrious, the other idle, but both perform a day's work equally good, ought I to give the latter the most wages? Indeed, lazy workmen are commonly observed to be more extravagant in their demands than the industrious. For if they have not more for their work, they cannot live as well. But though it be true to a proverb that lazy folks take the most pains, does it follow that they deserve the most money? If you were to employ servants in affairs of trust, would you not bid more for one you knew was naturally honest than for one naturally roguish, but who has lately acted honestly? For currents whose natural channel is damned up till the new course is by time worn sufficiently deep and become natural are apt to break their banks. If one servant is more valuable than another, has he not more merit than the other? And yet, this is not on account of superior self-denial. Is a patriot not praiseworthy if public spirit is natural to him? Is a pacing horse less valuable for being a natural pacer? Nor, in my opinion, has any man less merit or having in general natural, virtuous inclinations. The truth is that temperance, justice, charity, etc. are virtues, whether practiced with or against our inclinations. And the man who practices them merits our love and esteem. And self-denial is neither good nor bad, but as it is applied. He that denies a vicious inclination is virtuous in proportion to his resolution. But the most perfect virtue is above all temptation, such as the virtue of the saints in heaven. And he who does a foolish, indecent, or wicked thing, merely because it is contrary to his inclination, like some mad enthusiasts I have read of, who ran about naked under the notion of taking up the cross, is not practicing the reasonable science of virtue, but is a lunatic. End of self-denial, not the essence of virtue. By Benjamin Franklin. A Short Defence of Villains From Essays in Miniature, by Agnes Replier. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Read by Corey Samuel. Amid the universal greyness that has settled mysterly down upon English fiction. Amid the delicate drab-coloured shadings and half-lights, which require, we are told, so fine a skill in handling, the old-fashioned reader misses, now and then, the vivid colouring of his youth. He misses the slow unfolding of quite impossible plots, the thrilling incidents that will want pleasantly to arouse his apprehension, and, most of all, two characters once deemed essential to every novel—the hero and the villain. The heroine is left us still, and her functions are far more complicated than in the simple days of yore, when little was required of her, save to be it beautiful as the stars. She faces now the most intricate problems of life, and she faces them with conscious self-importance, a dismal power of analysis, and a robust candour in discussing their equivocal aspects that would have sent her buried sister blushing to the wall. There was sometimes a lamentable lack of solid virtue in this fair-dead sister, a pitiful human weakness that led to her undoing, but she never talked so glibly about sin. As for the hero, he owes his banishment to the riotous manner in which his masters handled him. All of us strained our endurance and our credulity to the utmost, Disraeli took a step further, and Lothair, the last of his race, perished amid the cruel laughter of mankind. But the villain! Remember what we owe to him in the past! Think how dear he has become to every rightly constituted mind! And now we are told, soberly and coldly, by the thin-blooded novelists of the day, that his absence is one of the crowning triumphs of modern genius, that we have all grown too discriminating to tolerate in fiction a character who we feel does not exist in life. Man, we are reminded, is complex, subtle, unfathomable, made up of good and evil so dexterously intermingled that no one element predominates coarsely over the rest. He is to be studied warily and with misgivings, not classified with brutal ease into the virtuous and bad. It is useless to explain to these analysts that the pleasure we take in meeting a character in a book does not always depend on our having known him in the family circle, or encountered him in our morning paper, though, judged even by this stringent law, the villain holds his own. Accept Balzac's rule, and exclude from fiction not only all which might not really happen, but all which has not really happened in truth, and we would still have studies enough in total depravity to darken all the novels in Christendom. What murder of romance was ever so wanton, so tragic, and so somber as that which gave to the Edinburgh Highway the name of Gabriel's Road? There, in the sweet summer afternoon, fresh with the breath of primoses and cowslips, the young tutor cut the throats of his two little pupils in a mad inexplicable revenge for their childish tale-bearing. Taken red-handed in the deed, he met with swift retribution from the furious populace, and the same hour which witnessed the crime, saw his pinioned corpse dangling from the nearest tree, with the bloody knife hung in awful mockery around its neck. Thus the murder, and its punishment, conspired to make the lonely road a haunted path, ghost-ridden, terrible, where women shivered and hurried on, and little boys creepy with fear scampered by, breathless in the dusk, seeing before them always on the ragged turf, two small, piteous, blood-smeared bodies, and hearing ever, overhead, the rattle of the rusty knife against the felon's bones. The highway, with its unholy associations, discreetly perpetuated in its name, became an education to the good people of Edinburgh, and taught them the value of emotions. They must have indistinctly felt what Mr. Louis Stevenson has so well described, the subtle harmony that unites an evil deed to its location. Some places, he says, speak distinctly, certain dark gardens cry aloud for a murder, certain old houses demand to be haunted, certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck. Other spots again seem to abide their destiny, suggestive and impenetrable, and is all this fine and delicate sentiment, all this skillful playing with horror and fear, to be lost to fiction merely because, as De Quincey reluctantly admits, the majority of murderers are incorrect characters. May we not forgive their gentle incorrectness for the sake of their literary and artistic value? Shall Charles Lamb's testimony count for nothing when we remember his comfortable allusion to kind, light-hearted wane-right? And what shall we think of Edward Fitzgerald, the gentlest and least hurtful of Englishman, abandoning himself in the clear and genial weather, to the delights of Tacitus, full of pleasant atrocity? Hardened villains, I must confess, are not greatly to my mind. They sacrifice their artistic to their ethical value, and must be handled with consummate skill to escape a suspicious flavour of Sunday-school romance. The hardened criminal, disarmed and converted by the innocent attractions of childhood, is a favourite device of poets and story-writers who cater to the sentiments of maternity, but it is wiser to lay no stress upon the permanency of such conversions. That swift and sudden yielding to a gentle emotion or a noble aspiration, which is one of the undying traits of humanity, attracts us often by the very force of its evanescence, by the limitations which prove its truth. But the slow, stern process of regeneration is not an emotional matter, and cannot be convincingly portrayed with a few facile touches in the last chapter of a novel. Thackeray knew better than this, when he showed a specky sharp, touched and softened by her good little sister-in-law, heart-sick now and then of her own troublesome schemes, yet sinking inevitably lower and lower through the weight of overmastering instincts and desires. She can aspire, intermittingly, to a cleaner life, but she can never hope to reach it. The simple literature of the past is curiously rich in these pathetic transient glimpses into fallen nature's brighter side. Where can we see depicted with more tenderness and truth the fitful relenting of man's brutality after it has wrought the ruin it devised, than in the final ballad of Edama Gordon? The young daughter of the House of Roads is lowered from the walls of the burning castle, and the cruel Gordon Spears transfix her as she falls. She lies dead, in her budding girlhood, at the feet of her father's foe, and his heart is strangely stirred and troubled when he looks at her childish face. O Bonnie, Bonnie was her mouth, and Cherry were her cheeks, and clear, clear was her yellow hair, whereon the red blood drips. Then with his spear he turned her oar, Ogin her face was wan. He said, you were the first that air, I wished alive again. He turned her oar and oar again, Ogin her skin was white. I might have spared that Bonnie face to her being some man's delight. It is pleasant to know that the ruthless butcher was promptly pursued and slain for his crime, but it is finer still to realise that brief moment of bitterness and shame. I have sometimes thought that Rosetti's sister Helen would have gained in artistic beauty if, after those three days of awful watching were over, after the glowing fragment of wax had melted in the flames, and her lover's soul had passed her, sighing on the wind. There had come to the stricken girl a pang of supreme regret, an impulse of mad desire to undo the horror she had wrought. The conscience of a sinner, to use a striking phrase of Mr. Brownells, is doubtless readjusted rather than repudiated altogether. And there is an absolute truthfulness in these sudden relapses into grace. For this reason, doubtless, I find Mr. Blackmore's villains, with all their fascination and power, a shade too heavily, or at least too monotonously, darkened. Parsonshown is a veritable devil, and it is only his occasional humour, manifested grimly in deeds not words, which enables us to bear the weight of his insupportable wickedness. The introduction of the naked savages, as an outrage to village propriety, the summons to church, when he has a mind to fire the ricks of his parishioners. These the life-giving touches which mellow down this overwrought figure, this black and scowling thunderbolt of humanity. Perhaps, also, Mr. Blackmore, in his laudable desire for picturesqueness, lays too much stress on the malignant aspect, the appropriate physical condition of his sinners. From Parsonshown's wondrous, unfathomable face, which chills every heart with terror, to the red glare in Donovan Bullrag's eyes, there is always something exceptional about these worthies to indicate to all beholders what manner of men they are. One is reminded of Charles II protesting not unnaturally against the perpetual swarthiness of stage-villains. We never see a rogue in a play but we clap on him a black periwig, complained the dark-skinned monarch, with a sense of personal grievance in this forced association between complexion and crime. It was the same subtle inspiration which prompted Keen to play Shylock in a red wig that suggested to Wilkie Collins count Froscoe's admirable size. The passion for embroidered waistcoats and fruit tarts, the petted white mice, the sympathetic gift of pastry to the organ grinder's monkey, all the little touches which go to build up this colossal, tender-hearted, remorseless, irresistible scoundrel, are of interest and value to the portrait, but his fat is as essential as his navery. It is one of those master-strokes of genius which breaks away from all accepted traditions to build up a new type, perfect and unapproachable. We can no more imagine a thin Froscoe than a melancholy Dick Swivler or a light-hearted Ravenswood. Mr. Andrew Lang, who enjoys upon all occasions the courage of his convictions, has, in one of those pleasant papers, at the sign of the ship, given utterance to a sentiment so shockingly at variance with the prevalent theory of fiction, that the reader is divided between admiration for his boldness and a vague surprise that a man should speak such words and live. There is a cheerfulness, too, about Mr. Lang's heterodoxy, a smiling ignorance of his own transgression that warms our hearts and weakens our upraiding. The old simple scheme, he says, in which you had a real, unmitigated villain, a heroine as pure as snow or flame, and a crowd of good ordinary people, gave us more agreeable reading, and reading not, I think, more remote from truth, than is to be found in Dr. Ibsen's ghosts or in his pillars of society. Now to support such a statement would be unscrupulous, to condemn it, dispiriting. But I wonder if the real, unmitigated villain is quite so simpler product as Mr. Lang appears to imagine. May not his absence from literature be owing as much to the limitations as to the disregard of modern realists? Is he, in truth, so easily drawn as to be unworthy of their subtle and discriminating pens? Is Sir Giles' overreach a mere child's toy in comparison with Consul Bernick? And is Brian de Bois Gilbert unworthy to rank with Johann Tonneson and Oswald Alving? A villain must be a thing of power, handled with delicacy and grace. He must be wicked enough to excite our aversion, strong enough to arouse our fear, human enough to awaken some transient gleam of sympathy. We must triumph in his downfall, yet not barbarously, nor with contempt, and the close of his career must be in harmony with all its previous development. His penal has told us the story of some old Venetian witches, who were converted from their dark ways and taught the charms of peace and godliness, but who would desire or credit the conversion of a witch? The potency of evil lies within her to the end, and, when by a few muttered words she can raise a hell-storm on the ocean, when her eyes dim fire can wither the strength of her enemy, or when, with a lock of hair and a bit of wax, she can consume him with torturing pain, who will welcome her neighborly advances? The proper and artistic end of a witch is at the stake, blue flames curling up to heaven and a handful of grey ashes scattered to the wind, or, by the working of a stronger spell, she may be stiffened into stone and doomed to stand for ever on some desolate moor, where, underneath starless skies, her evil feet have strayed. Or perhaps that huge black cat, her sinister attendant, has completed his ninth year of servitude to nine successive witches, and, by virtue of the power granted him their expiration, he may whisk her off bodily on St. John's Eve to offer her a living holocaust to Satan. These are possibilities in strict sympathy with her character and history, if not with her inclinations. The last is in a special accordance with sound Italian tradition, and all reveal what Hine calls the melancholy pleasurable awe, the dark sweet horror of medieval ghost fancies, but a converted witch, walking demurely to Vespa service, gossiping with good garrulous old women on the doorstep, or holding an innocent child within her withered arms. The very thought repels us instinctively, and fires us with a sharp mistrust. Have a care, you foolish young mother, and snatch your baby to your breast, for even now he waxes paler and paler, as those cold, malignant heart-throbs chill his breath, and wear his little life away. The final disposition of a mere earthly villain should likewise be a matter of artistic necessity, not a harsh trembling of arrogant virtue upon prostrate vice. There is no mistake so fatal as that of injustice to the evil element of a novel or a play. We all know how, when Portia pushes her triumphant casuistry a step too far, our sympathies veer obstantly round to Shylock's side, and refuse to be readjusted before the curtain falls. Perhaps Shakespeare intended this, who knows, and threw in Gratiano's last years to Madden, not the Asura, but the audience. Or perhaps in Elizabeth's day, as in King John's, people had not grown so finitial about the feelings of a Jew, and it is only the chilly tolerance of our enlightened age, which prevents our enjoying, as we should, the devout prejudices of our ancestors. But when, in a modern novel, guiltless of all this picturesque superstition, we see the sinner treated with a narrow, nagging sort of severity. Our unregenerate nature rebels stoutly against such a manifest lack of balance. Not long ago I chanced to read a story which actually dared to have a villain for a hero, and I promised myself much pleasure from so original and venturesome a step. But how did the very popular authoress treat her own creation? In the first place, when rescued from a truly feminine haze of hints, and dark whispers, and unsubstantiated innuendos, the hapless man is proven guilty of but three offences. He takes opium, he ejects his tenants, and he tries, not very successfully, to mesmerise his wife. Now, opium-eating is a vice, the punishment for which is borne by the offender, and which merits as much pity as contempt. Rack-renting is an unpardonable, but not at all a thrilling, Mr. Meena. And in these days of psychological research, there are many excellent men who would not shrink from making hypnotic experiments on their grandmothers. In consequence, however, of such feeble atrocities, the hero villain is subjected to a species of outlawry at the hands of all the good people in the book. His virtuous cousin makes open and highly honourable love to his virtuous wife, who responds with hearty alacrity. His virtuous cousin's still more virtuous brother comes with an ace of murdering him in cold blood, through motives of the purest philanthropy. Finally, one of these virtuous young men lets loose on him his family ghost, deliberately unsealing the spectral abiding place. And while the virtuous wife clings around the virtuous cousin's neck, and forbids him tenderly to go to the rescue, the accommodating spirit, who seems to have no sort of loyalty to the connection, slays the villain at his own doorstep, and leaves the coast free for a second marriage service. Practically, the device is an admirable one, because, when the ghost retires once more to his seclusion, nobody can well be convicted of manslaughter, and a great deal of scandal is saved. But artistically, there is something repellent in this open and shameless persecution, in three persons and a hobgoblin conspiring against one poor man. Our sentiment is diverted from its proper channel, our emotions are manifestly incorrect. How are you to get up the sympathies of the audience in a legitimate manner, asks Mr. Vincent Crummels, if there isn't a little man contending against a big one, and less as at least five to one, and we haven't hands enough for that business in our company? What would the noble hearted Mr. Crummels have thought of reversing this natural order of things, and declaring victory for the multitude? How would human nature, in the provinces, have supported so novel and hazardous an innovation? Why should human nature, out of the provinces, be assumed to have outgrown its simple chivalrous instincts? A good, strong, designing, despicable villain, or even villainess, a fair start, a stout fight, an artistic overthrow, and triumphant virtue smiling modestly beneath her orange blossoms. Shall we ever be too old and world-worn to love these old and world-worn things? End of A Short Defense of Villains by Agnes Replier Some Reflections on the Loss of the Titanic by Joseph Conrad This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This recording by James Christopher. It is with a certain bitterness that one must admit to oneself that the late SS Titanic had a good press. It is perhaps because I had no great practice of daily newspapers. I had never seen so many of them together lying about my room, that the white spaces and the big lettering of the headlines have an incongruously festive air to my eyes. A disagreeable effect of a feverish exploitation of a sensual godsend. And if ever a loss at sea fell under the definition, in the terms of a bill of lading, of act of God, this one does in its magnitude, suddenness, and severity, and in the chasing influence it should have on the self-confidence of mankind. I say this with all the seriousness of the occasion demands, though I have neither the confidence nor the wish to take a theological view of this great misfortune, sending so many souls to their last account. It is but a natural reflection. Another one, flowing also from the phraseology of bills of lading. A bill of lading is a shipping document limiting in certain of its clauses the liability of the carrier, is that the king's enemies of a more or less overt sort are not altogether sorry that this fatal mishap should strike the prestige of the greatest merchant service of the world. I believe that not a thousand miles from these shores certain public prints have betrayed in gothic letters their satisfaction to speak plainly by rather ill-natured comments. And what light one is to look at the action of the American Senate is more difficult to say. From a certain point of view, the sight of the august senators of a great power rushing to New York and beginning to bully and badger the luckless Yemsi, on the very quayside so to speak, seems to furnish the Shakespearean touch of the comic to the real tragedy of the fatuous drowning of all these people to who the last moment put their trust in mere bigness and the reckless affirmations of commercial men and mere technicians and in the irresponsible paragraphs of the newspapers booming these ships. Yes, a grim touch of comedy. One asks oneself what these men are after with this very provincial display of authority. I beg my friends in the United States pardon for calling these zealous senators men. I don't wish to be disrespectful. They may be of the stature of demigods for all I know, but at that great distance from the shores of a feet Europe and in the presence of so many guileless dead. Their size seems diminished from this side. What are they after? What is there for them to find out? We know what had happened. The ship scraped her side against a piece of ice and sank after floating for two hours and a half, taking a lot of people down with her. What more can they find from the unfair badgering of the unhappy Yemsi or the ruffianly abuse of the same? Yemsi, I should explain, is a mere coat address and I use it here symbolically. I have seen commerce pretty close. I know what it is worth and I have no particular regard for commercial magnates. But one must protest against these bumble-like proceedings. Is it indignation at the loss of so many lies which is at work here? Well, the American railroads killed very many people during one single year, I daresay. Then why don't these dignitaries come down on the presidents of their own railroads, of which one can't say whether they are mere means of transportation or a sort of gambling game for the use of American flutocrats? Is it only an ardent and upon-the-hole praiseworthy desire for information? But the reports of the inquiry tell us that the August senators, though raising a lot of questions testifying to the complete innocence and even blankness of their minds, are unable to understand what the second officer is saying to them. We are so informed by the press from the other side. Even such a simple expression as that one of the lookout men was stationed in the eyes of the ship was too much for the senators of the land of graphic expression. What it must have been in the more recondite manners I won't even try to think, because I have no mind for smiles just now. They were greatly exercised about the sound of explosions heard when half the ship was under water already. Was there one? Were there two? They seemed to be smelling a rat there. There's not some charitable soul told them, what even schoolboys who read sea stories know. That when a ship sinks from a leak like this, a deck or two is always blown up. And that when a steamship goes down by the head, the boilers may, and often do, break a drift with the sound which resembles the sound of an explosion. And they may indeed explode, for all I know. In the only case I have seen of a steamship sinking, there was such a sound. But I didn't dive down after her to investigate. It was not a 45,000 tons and declared unsinkable, but the sight was impressive enough. I shall never forget the muffled mysterious detonation, the sudden agitation of the sea around the slowly raised stern, and to this day I have in my eye the propeller, seen perfectly in its frame against a clear evening sky. But perhaps the second officer has explained them by this time, this and a few other little facts. The Wyand officer of the British Merchant Service should answer the questions of any king, emperor, autocrat or senator of any foreign power, as to an event in which a British ship alone was concerned, in which did not even take place in the territorial waters of that power, passes my understanding. The only authority he is bound to answer is the Board of Trade. But with what face the Board of Trade, which, having made the regulations for 10,000 ton ships, put its dear old bald head under its wing for ten years, took it out only to shelve an important report, and with a jury murmur unsinkable, put it back again. In the hope of not being disturbed for another ten years, with what face it will be putting questions to that man who has done his duty, as to the facts of this disaster, and as to his professional conduct in it. Well, I don't know. I have the greatest respect for our established authorities. I am a disciplined man, and I have a natural indulgence for the weaknesses of human institutions. But I will own that at times I have regretted there, how shall I say it? Their imponderability. A Board of Trade, what is it? A Board of... I believe the Speaker of the Irish Parliament is one of the members of it. A ghost, less than that, has yet a mere memory. An office with adequate and no doubt comfortable furniture, and a lot of perfectly irresponsible gentlemen who exist packed in its equitable atmosphere softly, as if in a lot of cotton wool, and with no care in the world, for there can be no care without personal responsibility, such, for instance, as the semen have. Those semen from whose mouths this irresponsible institution can take away the bread as a disciplinary measure. Yes, it's all that. And what more? The name of a politician, a party man. Less than nothing, a mere void without as much as a shadow of responsibility, cast into it from that light in which move the masses of men who work, who deal with things and face the realities. Not the words of this life. Years ago I remember overhearing two genuine shellbacks of the old type commenting on a ship's officer, who, if not exactly incompetent, did not commend himself to their severe judgment of an accomplished sailor man. Said one, resuming and concluding the discussion in a funnily judicial tone, the Board of Trade must have been drunk when they gave him his certificate. I confess that this notion of the Board of Trade as an entity having a brain, which could be overcome by the fumes of strong liquor charming exceedingly. For then it would have been unlike the limited companies of which some exasperated wit has once said that they had no souls to be saved and no bodies to be kicked, and thus were free in this world and the next from all the effective sanctions of conscientious conduct. But unfortunately, the picturesque pronouncement overheard by me was only characteristic sally of an annoyed sailor. The Board of Trade is composed of bloodless departments. It has no limbs and no physiognomy. Or else at the forthcoming inquiry, it might have paid to the victims of the Titanic disaster the small tribune of a blush. I ask myself whether the Marine Department of the Board of Trade did really believe, when they decided to shell the report on equipment for a time, that a ship of 45,000 tons, that any ship, could be made practically indestructible by means of watertight bulkheads. It seems incredible to anybody who had ever reflected upon the properties of material, such as wood or steel. You can't, let builders say what they like, make a ship of such dimensions as strong proportionally as a much smaller one. The shocks our old whalers had to stand amongst the heavy flows in Baffins Bay were perfectly staggering, notwithstanding the most skillful handling, and yet they lasted for years. The Titanic, if one may believe the last reports, has only scraped against a piece of ice which, I suspect, was not an enormously bulky and comparatively easily seen berg, but the low edge of a flow, and sank. Leisurely enough, God knows, and here the advantage of bulkhead comes in, for time is a great friend, a good helper, though in this lamentable case these bulkheads served only to prolong the agony of the passengers, who could not be saved. But she sank, causing, apart from the sorrow and the pity of the loss of so many lives, a sort of surprise consternation that such a thing could have happened at all. Why? All the forty-five thousand tons hotel of thin steel plates to secure the patronage of, say, a couple of thousand rich people, for if it had been the immigrant trade alone, there would have been no such exaggeration of mere size. You decorated in the style of the pharaohs, or in the Louis Quinze style, I don't know which, into pleas of the aforesaid fatuous handful of individuals, who have more money than they know what to do with, and to the applause of two continents. You launched that mass with two thousand people on board at twenty-one knots across the sea, a perfect exhibition of the modern blind trust in mere material and appliances. And then this happens, general uproar. The blind trust in material and appliances has received a terrible shock. I will say nothing of the credulity which accepts any statements which specialist technicians and office people are pleased to make, whether for the purposes of gain or glory. You stand there astonished and hurt in your profound sensibilities. But what else under the circumstances could you expect? For my part, I can much sooner believe an unsinkable ship of three thousand tons than in one of forty thousand tons. It is one of those things that stand to reason. You can't increase the thickness of scatling in plates indefinitely. And the mere weight of this bigness is an added disadvantage. In reading the reports, the first reflection which occurs to one is that, if that luckless ship had been a couple of hundred feet shorter, she would have probably gone clear of the danger. But then, perhaps, she could not have had a swimming bath in a French café. That, of course, is a serious consideration. I am well aware that those responsible for her short and fatal existence ask us in desolate accents to believe that if she had hit end on, she would have survived, which, by a sort of coy implication, seems to mean that it was all the fault of the officer of the watch. He is dead now, for trying to avoid the obstacle. We shall have presently, in deference to commercial and industrial interest, a new kind of seamanship, a very new and progressive kind. If you see anything in the way, by no means try to avoid it. Smash at it in full tilt, and then, and then only, you shall see the triumph of material, of clever contrivances, of the whole box of engineering tricks, in fact, and cover with glory the commercial concern of the most unmitigated sort, a general trust, and a great shipbuilding yard, justly feign for the super excellence of this material and workmanship. Unsinkable. See, I told you she was unsinkable. It only handled in accordance with the new seamanship. Everything's in that. And doubtless, the board of trade, if properly approached, would consent to give the needed instructions to its examiners of masters and mates. Behold the examination room of the future. Enter to the grizzled examiner a young man of modest aspect. Are you well up in the modern seamanship? I hope so, sir. Hmm, let's see. You are at night on the bridge in charge of a 150,000-ton ship, with a motor track, organ loft, et cetera, et cetera, with a full cargo of passengers, a full crew of 1,500 cafe waiters, two sailors, and a boy, three collapsible boats as per board of trade regulations, and going at your three-quarter speed of, say, about 40 knots. You perceive, suddenly right ahead, and close to, nothing that looks like a large ice flow. What would you do? Put the helm in midships. Very well, why? In order to head-head on. On what ground should you endeavor to head-head on? Because we are taught, by our builders and masters, that the heavier the smash, the smaller the damage, and because the requirements of material should be attended to. And so on and so on. The new seamanship, when in doubt, tried to rend fairly whatever's before you. Very simple. If only the Titanic had rammed that piece of ice, which was not a monstrous berg, fairly, every puffing paragraph would have been vindicated in the eyes of the credulous public which pays. But would it have been? Well, I doubt it. I am well aware that in the 80s, the steamship Arizona, one of the greyhounds of the ocean in the jargon of that day, did run bows on against a very unmistakable iceberg, and managed to get into port on her collision bulkhead. But the Arizona was not, if I remember rightly, 5,000 tons register, let alone 45,000, and she was not going at 20 knots per hour. I can't be perfectly certain at this distance of time, but her sea speed could not have been more than 14 at the outside. Both these facts made for safety, and even if she had been injured to go 20 knots, there would not have been behind that speed the enormous mass. So difficult to check in its impetus. The terrific weight of which is bound to do damage to itself or others at the slightest contact. I assure you it is not for the vain pleasure of talking about my own poor experiences, but only to illustrate my point that I will relate here a very unsensational little incident I witnessed now, rather more than 20 years ago in Sydney, New South Wales. Ships were beginning then to grow bigger year after year, though of course the present dimensions were not even dreamt of. I was standing on the circular quay with a Sydney pilot watching a big male steamship of one of our best known companies being brought alongside. We admired her lines, her noble appearance, and were impressed by her size as well, though her length I imagine was hardly less than half that of the Titanic. She came into the cove, as that part of the harbor is called, of course very slowly, and at some hundred feet or so short of the quay she lost her way. That quay was then a wooden one, a fine structure of mighty piles and stringers bearing a roadway, a thing of great strength. The ship, as I have said before, stopped moving when some hundred feet from it. Then her engines were rung on slow ahead, and immediately rung off again. The propeller made just about five turns I should say. She began to move, stealing on so to speak without a ripple, coming alongside with the utmost gentleness. I went on looking her over, very much interested, but the man with me, the pilot, muttered under his breath, too much, too much. His exercise judgment had warned him of what I did not even suspect. But I believe that neither of us was exactly prepared for what happened. There was a faint concussion of the ground under our feet, a groaning of piles, a snapping of great iron bolts, and with the sound of ripping and splintering, as when a tree is blown down by the wind, a great strong piece of wood, a balk of square timber, was displaced several feet as if by enchantment. I looked at my companion in amazement. I could not have believed it, I declared. No, he said. He would not have thought that she would have cracked an egg, eh? I certainly wouldn't have thought that. He shook his head and added, I, these great big things, they want some handling. Some months afterwards I was back in Sydney. The same pilot brought me in from the sea, and I found the same steamship, or else another as like her as two peas, lying at anchor not far from us. The pilot told me she had arrived the day before, and that he was to take her alongside tomorrow. I reminded him jocularly of the damage to the quay. Oh, he said, we are not allowed now to bring the men under their own steam. We are using tugs. A very wise regulation, and this is my point, that size is to a certain extent an element of weakness. The bigger the ship, the more delicately she must be handled. Here is a contact which, in the pilot's own words, you wouldn't think could have cracked an egg, with the astonishing result of something like eighty feet of good strong wooden quay shaken loose. And both snapped, a balk of stout timber splintered. Now suppose that quay had been a granite, as surely it is now, or instead of the quay, if there had been, say, a North Atlantic fog there, would the full-grown iceberg in it awaiting the gentle contact of a ship groping its way along blindfold. Something would have been hurt, but it would not have been the iceberg. Apparently there is a point in development when it ceases to be true progress in trades, in games, in the marvellous handiwork of men, and even in their demands and desires and aspirations of the moral and mental kind. There is a point when progress to remain a real advance must change slightly the direction of its line. But this is a wide question. What I wanted to point out here is that the old Arizona, the marvel of her day, was proportionally stronger, handier, better equipped than this triumph of modern naval architecture, the loss of which, in common parlance, will remain the sensation of this year. The clatter of the presses has been worthy of the tonnage of the preliminary peons of triumph around that vanished hull, of the reckless statements and elaborate descriptions of its ornate splendor, a great babble of news and what sort of news, too, good heavens, an eager comment has arisen around this catastrophe, though it seems to me that less astride at note would have been more becoming in the presence of so many victims left struggling on the sea, of lives miserably thrown away for nothing, or worse than nothing, for false standards of achievement, to satisfy a vulgar demand of a few money people for a banal hotel luxury, the only one they can understand, and because the big ship pays, in one way or another, in money or in advertising value. It is in more ways than one a very ugly business, and the mere scrape along the ship's side, so slight that, if the reports are to be believed, it did not interrupt the card party and the gorgeously fitted, and chased style, smoking room, or was it the delightful French café, is enough to bring on the exposure? All the people on board existed under a sense of false security. How false, it has been sufficiently demonstrated, and the fact which seems undoubted, that some of them actually were reluctant to enter the boat when told to do so, shows the strength of that falsehood. Incidentally, it also shows the sort of discipline on board these ships, the sort of hold kept on the passengers in the face of the unforgiving sea. These people seem to imagine it in an optional manner, whereas the order to leave the ship should be an order of the sternest character to be obeyed unquestioningly and promptly by everyone on board, with men to enforce it at once, and to carry it out methodically and swiftly. And it is no use to say that it cannot be done, for it can. It has been done. The only requisite is manageableness of the ship herself and of the number she carries on board. That is a great thing which makes for safety. A commander should be able to hold his ship in everything on board of her in the hollow of his hand, as it were. But with the modern foolish trust and material, and with those floating hotels, this has become impossible. A man may do his best, but he cannot succeed in a task which from greed, or more likely from sheer stupidity, has been made too great for anybody's strength. The readers of the English Review, who cast a friendly eye nearly six years ago on my remanences, and know how much the merchant service, ships, and men has been to me, will understand my indignation that these men of whom, speaking in no sentimental phrase, but in the very truth of feeling, I can't even now think otherwise than as brothers, have been put by their commercial employers in the impossibility to perform efficiently their plain duty. And this remotives which I shall not enumerate here, but whose intrinsic unworthiness is plainly revealed by the greatness, the miserable greatness of that disaster. Some of them have perished. To die for commerce is hard enough, but to go under that sea we have been trained to combat, with a sense of failure in the supreme duty of one's calling is indeed a bitter fate. Thus they are gone, and the responsibility remains with the living, who will have no difficulty in replacing them by others just as good, at the same wages. It was their bitter fate. But I, who can look at some arduous years when their duty was my duty too, and their feelings were my feelings, can remember some of us who once upon a time were more fortunate. It is of them that I would talk a little, for my own comfort partly, and also because I am sticking all the time to my subject to illustrate my point, the point of manageableness which I have raised just now. Since the memory of the lucky Arizona has been evoked by others than myself, and may use of me for my own purpose, let me call up the ghost of another ship of that distant day whose less lucky destiny inculcates another lesson making for my argument. The Duro, a ship belonging to the Royal Male Steam Packet Company, was rather less than one-tenth the measurement of the Titanic, yet, strange as it may appear, to the ineffable hotel exquisites who formed the bulk of the first-class cross-Atlantic passengers, people of position and wealth and refinement did not consider it an intolerable hardship to travel in her, even all the way from South America, this being the service she was engaged upon. Of her speed I know nothing, but it must have been the average of the period, and the decorations of her saloons were, I daresay, quite up to the mark. But I doubt if her birth had been boastfully paragraphed all around the press, because that was not the fashion of the time. She was not a massive material, gorgeously furnished and upholstered. She was a ship. And she was not, in the apt words of an article, by Commander C. Crunchley, R. N. R., which I have just read, run by a sword of hotel syndicate composed of the chief engineer, the purser, and the captain. As these monstrous Atlantic fairies are. She was really commanded, manned, and equipped as a ship meant to keep the sea. A ship first and last in the fullest meaning of the term, as the fact I am going to relate will show. She was off the Spanish coast, homeward bound, and fairly full just like the Titanic. And further, the proportion of her crew to her passengers, I remember quite well, was very much the same. The exact number of souls on board I have forgotten. It might have been nearly 300, certainly not more. The night was moonlit but hazy. The weather fine with a heavy swell running from the westward, which means that she must have been rolling a great deal. And in that respect, the conditions for her were worse than in the case of the Titanic. Sometime, either just before or just after midnight, to the best of my recollection, she was run into a midships and at right angles by a large steamer, after which backed out, and herself apparently damaged, remained motionless at some distance. My recollection is that the door remained afloat after the collision for 15 minutes of their abouts. It might have been 20, but certainly something under a half hour. In that time, the boats were lowered, all the passengers put into them, and the lot shoved off. There was no time to do anything more. All the crew of the door went down with her, literally without a murmur. When she went, she plunged bodily down like a stone. The only members of the ship's company who survived were the third officer, who was from the first order to take charge of the boats, and the seamen told off to man them, two in each. Nobody else was picked up. A quartermaster, one of the saved in the way of duty, with whom I talked a month or so afterwards, told me that they pulled up to the spot, but could neither see ahead nor hear the faintest cry. But I have forgotten. A passenger was drowned. She was a lady's maid who, frenzy with terror, refused to leave the ship. One of the boats waited nearby till the chief officer, finding himself absolutely unable to tear the girl away from the rail to which she clung with a frantic grasp, ordered the boat away out of danger. My quartermaster told me that he spoke over to them in his ordinary voice. And this was the last sound heard before the ship sank. The rest is silence. I dare say there was a usual official inquiry, but who cared for it? That sort of thing speaks for itself with no uncertain voice, though the papers I remember gave the event no space to speak of, no large headlines, no headlines at all. You see, it was not the fashion at the time. A seaman-like piece of work of which one cherishes the old memory at this juncture more than ever before. She was a ship-commanded, man-equipped, not a sort of marine writs, proclaimed unsinkable and sent adrift with its casual population upon the sea, without enough boats, without enough seaman, but with the Parisian Café and 400 of poor devils of waiters to meet the dangers, which, let the engineers say what they like, lurk always amongst the waves, sent with a blind trust in mere material, lightheartedly to a most miserable, most fatuous disaster. There are, too, many ugly developments about this tragedy. The rush of the senatorial inquiry before the poor wretches escaped from the jaws of death had time to draw breath. The vituperative abuse of a man no more guilty than others in this matter and the suspicion of this aimless fuss being a political move to get home on the empty company, into which, in common parlance, the United States government has got its knife. I don't pretend to know why, though with the rest of the world I'm aware of the fact. Perhaps there may be an excellent and worthy reason for it, but I venture to suggest that to take advantage of so many pitiful corpses is not pretty, and the exploiting of the mere sensation on the other side is not pretty in its wealth of heartless inventions. Neither is the welter of Marconi lies which has not been sent vibrating without some reason, for which it would be nauseous to inquire too closely, and the calamitous, baseless, gratuitous, circumstantial lie charging poor Captain Smith with desertion of his post by means of suicide is the vilest and most ugly thing of all this outburst of journalistic enterprise, without feeling, without honor, without decency. But all this has its moral, and that other sinking which I have related here into the memory of which a seaman turns with relief and thankfulness has a moral too. Yes, material may fail, and men too may fail sometimes, but more often men, when they are given the chance, will prove themselves truer than steel, that wonderful thin steel from which the sides and the bulkheads of our modern sea Leviathans are made. End of, some reflections on the loss of the Titanic.