e 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.

Certainly, in the sphere of education there is a growing belief that some
radical reform is needed; and this dissatisfaction is in itself wholesome.
Boys come into college with no reading and with minds unused to the very
practice of study; and they leave college, too often, in the same state of
nature. There are even those, inside and outside of academic halls, who
protest that our higher institutions of learning simply fail to educate at
all. That is slander; but in sober earnest, you will find few experienced
college professors, apart from those engaged in teaching purely
utilitarian or practical subjects, who are not convinced that the general
relaxation is greater now than it was