I long ago came to the conclusion that the real heroes of the world were on the sea.  The ambitions of men crowded together on land were incontestably disgusting.  On the vast, restless deep men stand alone, in brave conflict with constant danger.  I was always deeply impressed by the character of men, as revealed in disasters of the sea.  There were many of them during my life-time.  The bigger the ships grew, the more dangerous became ocean travel.  Our improvements seemed to add to the humour of grim old Neptune.  In 1884 the ocean was becoming a great turnpike road, and people were required by law to keep to the right or to the left.  A population of a million sailors was on the sea at all times.  Some of the ships were too busy to stop to save human lives, as was the case in the disaster of the “Florida.”  In distress, her captain hailed “The City of Rome,” a monster of the deep.  But “The City of Rome” had no time to stop, and passed on by.  The lifeboats of the “Florida” were useless shells, utterly unseaworthy.  The “Florida” was unfit for service.  John Bayne, the engineer, was the hero who lost his life to save others.  But this was becoming a common story of the sea; for when the “Schiller” went down, Captain Thomas gave his life for others.  When the “Central-America” sank, President Arthur’s father-in-law perished in the same way.  Every shipwreck I have known seems lighted up with some marvellous deed of heroism in man.

In 1884 there was a failure in Wall Street for eight or ten million dollars, and hundreds went down during this shipwreck.  By heroism and courage alone were they able to outlive it.  To whom did all this money belong?  To those who were drowned in the storm of financial sea.  But it was only a Wall Street flurry; it did not affect the national ship as it would have done twenty years before.  The time had passed when Wall Street could jeopardise the commerce of the country.  Twenty years before, such a calamity in three days’ time would have left all the business of the nation in the dust.  It would have crashed down all the banks, the insurance companies, the stock-houses.  New York, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, New Orleans—­from coast to coast, everything would have tumbled down.

The principal lesson derived from this panic was to keep excitable men out of Wall Street.  While the romance of a failure for hundreds of thousands of dollars is more appealing than a failure for a small sum, the greater the deficit the greater the responsibility.  Ferdinand Ward was in this Wall Street crash of 1883.  The roseate glasses of wealth through which he saw the world had made him also see millions in every direction.  George L. Seney lost his bank and railroad stock in this failure, but he had given hundreds of thousands to the cause of education, North and South.  Some people regretted that he had not kept his fortune to help him out of his trouble.  I believe there were thousands of good people all over the country who prayed that this philanthropist might be restored to wealth.  There was one man in Wall Street at this time who I said could not fail.  He was Mr. A.S.  Hatch, President of the New York Stock Exchange.  He had given large sums of money to Christian work, and was personally an active church member.