The further news of the loss of the Atlantic shows
that not only did Captain Williams go to bed when near, by his own reckoning, to a most dangerous coast, but that he left the wreck before eighty of the passengers had been saved. H e says he did this on the ground that his feet and legs were getting numbed, and that in that condition he could be of no further use. Very likely. But were not the feet and legs of the passengers also getting numbed, and was not the captain trustee for the lives of his passengers before his own? He is said by some accounts to have behaved like a hero before he left. It would have been more like a hero to let every one whom his carelessness had endangered take the chances of escape before himself. The mere we hear of the wreak, the more clear it seems that Captain Williams must bear a very large part of the moral responsibility for that terrible calamity.
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