FORTITUDE OF IMAGINATION.
THE great catastrophes reported in London during this Christ- mas-tide, especially the Railway accident at Shipton and the burning of the ' Cospatrick,' are heartrending at once in their vast- ness and in the horror of their incidental details, and it is perhaps only natural that those who hear of them, and who contrast them with their own comfort and security, should shriek aloud. Never- theless, at the risk of being considered a little hard-hearted, we can- not avoid deprecating this excessive sensibility, this apparent public indulgence in the luxury of a safe hysteria at home. When Goethe
and adds a zest to life. Mr. Alfred Garrod threw out not long ' declared that the earthquake of Lisbon had destroyed his faith in
God, for no God with absolute power could have suffered such a catastrophe, he was not only talking nonsense—for after all, the earthquake of Lisbon destroyed fewer persons than die every year in Portugal in an undramatic way—but bad nonsense, the non- sense of mere impatience and annoyance, and much of the lan- guage of Englishmen about great accidents is marked by a similar hysteric deficiency of morale. So far, of course, as the horror is produced by a true sympathy, or is the reflection of the natural and most pitiable horror of relations, friends, or other survivors of the lost, it is deserving of all tolerance, or even praise ; but much of it is, we fear, due only to a reflex selfishness, to horror at the thought that we might suffer as the victims of the catastrophe are suffering. We question, for example, whether the destruc- tion of the Cospatrick ' creates one-third of the emotion caused by the accident at Shipton, though the former disaster is not only three times as great as the latter, but ten times as full of all true elements of tragedy ; and the difference is due to the fact that we are much more likely to be killed or mutilated in a railway acci- dent, than to be forced to drown ourselves in order to escape being burned to death at sea. There were circumstances of ex- treme pain attending the Railway accident, incidents of time, of persons, and of consequences which naturally attracted a public which finds in the worst horrors, we fear, something of a pleasant cruddling of the blood, but all of them put together made up to those who could realise both, nothing compared with the burning of the Cospatrick,' and neither was more than an unusual in- stance of that sternness with which the most determined Universalists must acknowledge that nature, or God's Pro- vidence, or the unknown determining cause habitually works. We do not want to preach sermons, though we can understand those who say the Spectator is always doing it, but we should like to see a little more of the Oriental spirit of re- signation—resignation not to man's folly, but to Heaven's laws— in the public mind. Death is in the world, by no act of ours and under no control of ours, and to shriek incessantly because it is there is not only useless, but positively harmful. We all see that in the ease of the victims themselves ; we all admire their fortitude ; we all glow when they exhibit especial courage ; when the Captain of the 'La Flats' waves away aid and goes down with his ship, doing his duty unshaken to the last ; when the Captain of the ' Coszatrick,' having refused to rush to the boats, gives his wife one last chance by throwing her overboard, and leaps after her into the sea ; when a passenger in the train, already dying, staggers up to help the wounded, and in the effort dies ; but we all fail to imitate their noble attitude,—all sit and wring our hands, and rush into the strange form of cursing God and the laws and the Companies called "letters of suggestion." Can't we sit quiet for one moment, and know that He is Lord? We regret to put down a sentence which has been degraded till it savours of cant, but we cannot remake the English language, and that expression contains a truth which the English people would do well to recall, reflecting at the same time whether they are honestly sympathising or only betraying an ignorant and angry impatience. If they can prevent accidents like that at Shipton, well ; they are doing their duty in preventing them ; but if not, then a little resig- nation would befit them, just as it does the sufferers who, to their high honour be it spoken, are usually not half as impatient as we are. We do not believe they can prevent them. Railway accidents are partly preventable by care, and may be wholly preventable by the adoption of low speeds—we doubt it, but still France has had no great accident this year—but the con- ditions granted, which are the movement of vast multitudes, a high rate of speed, and no human control over the weather, acci- dents, and great accidents, will occur till the Railway system is superseded. So far as man can perceive, man had nothing to do, except unconsciously, with this horrible business in Oxford- shire, or the far more horrible business in the South Pacific. Train and ship were alike in good order, alike well handled, alike doing the work they were intended to do, when they came to the end which comes to us all, and is as terrible for the isolated unit as for the group. The train went to pieces, the ship took fire ; the mass of humanity was killed, maimed, shocked for life ; just exactly as the individual slips on a piece of orange-peel, falls back on his bead, and sinks in an instant from a strong man or a charming woman into a drivelling idiot. There is no difference, except in the multiplication on one spot, in one moment, of many such horrors, and no good in being overcome by tidings of catastrophe. We are not blind to the pathos of the situation, as the reporters—who, we are glad to see, break down not at sight
of the wounds, but of the pitiful grief of the survivors recog- nising their dead—are apt to call it, produced by accidents to multitudes, to the width, as it were, of the suffering, the breadth of the ruin, and heartily rejoice when help comes instantly and fully ; but we do not like to hear of whole classes of travellers avoiding Railways because a great accident has occurred, or of the loss of a single vessel affecting emigration to the South. There is a want of fortitude in the imagination of persons thus affected, which speaks ill for their moral stamina. They demand courage in action, and we see no reason why they should not also require it in thought.
We have not much more tolerance for that kind of impatient anger with circumstances which makes so many people without special knowledge rush into print with feeble and sometimes very silly suggestions. If they know anything, let them say it, by all means ; but they have no right to rush about shouting, and so adding to the confusion, just to relieve themselves from the burden of conscious helplessness. Let every train, of course, be as perfectly equipped as possible, but when that has been done there will remain a per-centage of accident which no human effort can prevent, and which human beings have only to bear as they bear their certainty of death. A huge block, weighing perhaps a hundred tons, and composed of hundreds of pieces, is shot out of a station at a quarter of the speed of an ordinary shell, and do what man may, one of those pieces will occasionally fail, to the ruin of the entire structure. To secure absolute immunity, railway passengers must control the weather, the lightning, the floods, and the hearts, energies, and abilities of thousands of workmen scattered all over the country, any one of whom may leave a weak place in his work fatal to the whole machine. It is impossible for them to do it, as impossible as to contrive that no cab shall ever be overturned ; and after every effort has been made, they ought to take that residuum of chance into consideration, and consider when the lot falls that an earthquake has happened, that a calamity has occurred over which human foresight, or energy, or will had and could have no control whatever. The event is to be mourned over ; the survivors assisted ; the causes, so far as possible, scientifically investigated ; but, after that, something of resignation to the inevit- able should enter into the public mind, and induce it to distin- guish between its own sympathy, which is good, and its own tendency to work off that sympathy by fussy offers of usually useless suggestion.
It is, we confess, difficult not to feel irritated when an accident occurs like the burning of the ' Cospatrick,' and there is at one stage of the calamity reason for the irritation. It seems to an on-looker as if fire on board a ship could always be prevented, either by watching, as gunpowder factories are watched, or by using the water which lies all around, but as a matter of fact, this assump- tion is not strictly true. No precaution can completely prevent the chance of fire at sea from lightning, from spontaneous combustion, or from the indispensable employment of fire on board, and the intellect of shipbuilders seems to have been taxed in vain to make of the ocean-water around a complete preservative. Fire rushes up a ship's hatchways as it
rushes up a chimney, and once it has caught hold in a crowded vessel, rescue is all but impossible. No ship could carry boats sufficient for a body of emigrants or troops, besides the necessary stores, more especially of water, always the thing which fails first, and the failure of which is most destructive. No ship could be so built that she might be on fire in one place, and her crew and passengers stand unharmed by smoke or flame in another. And no sedative has been discovered which would enable the passengers so situated to retain the necessary energy and calm. There are a few dangers which masses of men cannot be trained to meet, and many which untrained men cannot bring themselves to face at all. One of the former is earthquake. We speak on sound South-American authority when we say that man cannot be
trained to face earthquake, that experience only increases the fear, and that wholly apart from courage, men have not reason enough remaining to labour till the calamity is past. Earthquake is the only danger which sleepers fly from while still unwakened. A mine is in a less degree a similarly powerful cause of fear. No troops known, unlPss selected for forlorn-hope duty, will stand quietly upon a mine. And on the undisciplined, fire has, except in rare instances, a nearly equal effect. The majority of mankind when in danger from fire do not retain reason enough for fortitude to exist, and either submit passively, as horses always do, or rush wildly about seeking escape, as most other animals are found to do. A mass of passengers like those in the ' Cospatrick,' half of them women and children, all uneducated, all entirely unaccustomed to this danger, can no more be controlled than wild animals can, and unless they are controlled escape rapidly becomes hopeless, even for the few for whom there is provision. No amount of thinking, or precaution, or advice to owners will ever remove this source of danger, or ever eliminate fire totally and finally from the dangers of the sea. The horror—and the burning of the Cospatrick ' is a horror on which the mind can scarcely dwell and remain healthy—has to be borne, as the horror of earthquake has to be borne, in submis- sion to the power, be it what it may, which has ordained so much that it appals man to realise fully to himself. We are not wont to preach submission, but we cannot avoid the sense that some- times submission, be it religious or merely intellectual, is an abso- lute condition of strength, and we see some lack of it in this country now. Sympathy, pity, investigation can never diminish strength, but imaginative horror undoubtedly does, and there is
a tendency, we fear, in too many minds to indulge in it as if it were a healthy gratification.
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