ut under the British flag! A country
yet to be the home of millions! It is worth living to be able to plant
such a tree, which will shelter and bless future generations of mankind.
Financial loss he might have; but he would have fame as his reward.

CHAPTER III.

"ACROSS THE STORMY SEA."

Oh dreadful war! It is not only in the deadly horror of battle, and in
the pain and anguish of men strong and hearty, done to death by human
hands. It is not only in the rotting heap of horses and men, torn to
pieces by bullets and shell, and thrust together within huge pits in one
red burial blent. It is not only in the helpless widow and her brood of
dazed and desolate children weeping over the news that comes from the
battlefield, that war become so hideous. It is always, as it was in the
time of the Europe-shadowing Napoleon when for twenty years the wheels
of industry in Britain were stopped. It is always the derangement of
business, the increased price of food for the poor, the decay of trade,
the cutting off of supplies, and the stopping of works of improvement
that brings conditions which make poverty so terrible. Rags! A bed of
straw; a crust of bread; the shattered roof; the naked floor; a deal
table; a broken chair! A writer whose boyhood saw the terror, and want,
and despair of the last decade of the Napoleonic War, puts into the
mouth of the victim of poverty this terrible wail:

"But why do I talk of death?
That phantom of grizzly bone;
I hardly fear his terrible shape
It seems so like my own;
It seems so like my own,
Because of the fasts I keep;
Oh God, that bread should be so dear
And flesh and blood so cheap!"

To the philanthropist or the benevolent sympathiser like Lord Selkirk,
who aims at benefiting suffering humanity, it is not the trouble, the
self-sacrifice, or the spending of money in relief that is the worry,
but it is the bitterness, the suspicion, the unworkableness, and the
selfishness of the poverty-stricken themselves that disturbs and
distresses the benefactor's heart. It is often too the heartlessness and
prejudice of those who oppose the benefactor's plans that causes the
generous man anxiety and even at times despair. Poverty in its worst
form is a gaunt and ravenous beast, that bites the hand of friend or foe
that is stretched out toward it. So Lord Selkirk found it, when he
undertook to help the poverty-stricken Celts of the Scottish Highlands
and of the West of Ireland.