all said it would be foolish to go out; we never should work through the surf.  We saw five or six men clinging to the mast, making desperate signals.  We all felt that something must be done, but what could we do?  One hour passed, two hours, and we all stood there.  We all felt most uncomfortable.  Then, all of a sudden, through the storm, it seemed to us as if we heard their cries—­ they had a boy with them.  We could not stand that any longer.  All at once we said, “We must go!” The women said so too; they would have treated us as cowards if we had not gone, although next day they said we had been fools to go.  As one man, we rushed to the boat, and went.  The boat capsized, but we took hold of it.  The worst was to see poor drowning by the side of the boat, and we could do nothing to save him.  Then came a fearful wave, the boat capsized again, and we were cast ashore.  The men were still rescued by the D. boat, ours was caught miles away.  I was found next morning in the snow.”

The same feeling moved also the miners of the Rhonda Valley, when they worked for the rescue of their comrades from the inundated mine.  They had pierced through thirty-two yards of coal in order to reach their entombed comrades; but when only three yards more remained to be pierced, fire-damp enveloped them.  The lamps went out, and the rescue-men retired.  To work in such conditions was to risk being blown up at every moment.  But the raps of the entombed miners were still heard, the men were still alive and appealed for help, and several miners volunteered to work at any risk; and as they went down the mine, their wives had only silent tears to follow them—­not one word to stop them.

There is the gist of human psychology.  Unless men are maddened in the battlefield, they “cannot stand it” to hear appeals for help, and not to respond to them.  The hero goes; and what the hero does, all feel that they ought to have done as well.  The sophisms of the brain cannot resist the mutual-aid feeling, because this feeling has been nurtured by thousands of years of human social life and hundreds of thousands of years of pre-human life in societies.

“But what about those men who were drowned in the Serpentine in the presence of a crowd, out of which no one moved for their rescue?” it may be asked.  “What about the child which fell into the Regent’s Park Canal—­also in the presence of a holiday crowd—­and was only saved through the presence of mind of a maid who let out a Newfoundland dog to the rescue?” The answer is plain enough.  Man is a result of both his inherited instincts and his education.  Among the miners and the seamen, their common occupations and their every-day contact with one another create a feeling of solidarity, while the surrounding dangers maintain courage and pluck.  In the cities, on the contrary, the absence of common interest nurtures indifference, while courage and pluck, which seldom find their opportunities, disappear, or take another