hard-won area of order and self-subordination amidst a vast wilderness of anarchy and barbarism that are with difficulty held in check and are continually threatening to overrun their bounds.  But that is equally no reason for over-confidence.  Civilization is like a ship traversing an untamed sea.  It is a more complex machine in our day, with command of greater forces, and might seem correspondingly safer than in the era of sails.  But fresh catastrophes have shown that the ancient perils of navigation still confront the largest vessel, when the crew loses its discipline or the officers neglect their duty; and the analogy is not without its warning.

Only a year after the sinking of the Titanic I was crossing the ocean, and it befell by chance that on the anniversary of that disaster we passed not very far from the spot where the proud ship lay buried beneath the waves.  The evening was calm, and on the lee deck a dance had been hastily organized to take advantage of the benign weather.  Almost alone I stood for hours at the railing on the windward side, looking out over the rippling water where the moon had laid upon it a broad street of gold.  Nothing could have been more peaceful; it was as if Nature were smiling upon earth in sympathy with the strains of music and the sound of laughter that reached me at intervals from the revelling on the other deck.  Yet I could not put out of my heart an apprehension of some luring treachery in this scene of beauty—­and certainly the world can offer nothing more wonderfully beautiful than the moon shining from the far East over a smooth expanse of water.  Was it not in such a calm as this that the unsuspecting vessel, with its gay freight of human lives, had shuddered, and gone down, forever?  I seemed to behold a symbol; and there came into my mind the words we used to repeat at school, but are, I do not know just why, a little ashamed of to-day: 

  Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State! 
  Sail on, O Union, strong and great! 
  Humanity with all its fears,
  With all its hopes of future years,
  Is hanging breathless on thy fate!...

Something like this, perhaps, is the feeling of many men—­men by no means given to morbid gusts of panic—­amid a society that laughs overmuch in its amusement and exults in the very lust of change.  Nor is their anxiety quite the same as that which has always disturbed the reflecting spectator.  At other times the apprehension has been lest the combined forces of order might not be strong enough to withstand the ever-threatening inroads of those who envy barbarously and desire recklessly; whereas today the doubt is whether the natural champions of order themselves shall be found loyal to their trust, for they seem no longer to remember clearly the word of command that should unite them in leadership.  Until they can rediscover some common ground of strength and purpose in the first principles of education and law and property and religion, we are in danger of falling a prey to the disorganizing and vulgarizing domination of ambitions which should be the servants and not the masters of society.