And it is just because we are all beginning to realise the immense need for this heroic quality in those who rule and are rich and powerful, as the response and corrective to these distrusts and jealousies that are threatening to disintegrate our social order, that we have all followed the details of this great catastrophe in the Atlantic with such intense solicitude.  It was one of those accidents that happen with a precision of time and circumstance that outdoes art; not an incident in it all that was not supremely typical.  It was the penetrating comment of chance upon our entire social situation.  Beneath a surface of magnificent efficiency was—­slap-dash.  The third-class passengers had placed themselves on board with an infinite confidence in the care that was to be taken of them, and they went down, and most of their women and children went down with the cry of those who find themselves cheated out of life.

In the unfolding record of behaviour it is the stewardesses and bandsmen and engineers—­persons of the trade-union class—­who shine as brightly as any.  And by the supreme artistry of Chance it fell to the lot of that tragic and unhappy gentleman, Mr. Bruce Ismay, to be aboard and to be caught by the urgent vacancy in the boat and the snare of the moment.  No untried man dare say that he would have behaved better in his place.  He escaped.  He thought it natural to escape.  His class thinks it was right and proper that he did escape.  It is not the man I would criticise, but the manifest absence of any such sense of the supreme dignity of his position as would have sustained him in that crisis.  He was a rich man and a ruling man, but in the test he was not a proud man.  In the common man’s realisation that such is indeed the case with most of those who dominate our world, lies the true cause and danger of our social indiscipline.  And the remedy in the first place lies not in social legislation and so forth, but in the consciences of the wealthy.  Heroism and a generous devotion to the common good are the only effective answer to distrust.  If such dominating people cannot produce these qualities there will have to be an end to them, and the world must turn to some entirely different method of direction.

Sec. 2

The essential trouble in our growing Labour disorder is the profound distrust which has grown up in the minds of the new generation of workers of either the ability or the good faith of the property owning, ruling and directing class.  I do not attempt to judge the justice or not of this distrust; I merely point to its existence as one of the striking and essential factors in the contemporary Labour situation.