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