l whom
every man knows that he must some day encounter, but whom most of us
hope to find at the end of some road a very long way off waiting for us
with comforting and soothing hands. We do not expect to meet him
suddenly turning the corner of the street, or in an environment of
refined and elegant conviviality, or in the midst of our noonday
activities, or at midnight on the high seas when we are dreaming on
feather pillows. But it was thus that those on the _Titanic_ encountered
him, waiting there in the ice and the starlight, arresting the ship's
progress with his out-stretched arm, and standing by, waiting, while the
sense of his cold presence gradually sank like a frost into their
hearts.

To say that all the men who died on the _Titanic_ were heroes would be
as absurd as to say that all who were saved were cowards. There were
heroes among both groups and cowards among both groups, as there must be
among any large number of men. It is the collective behaviour and the
general attitude towards disaster that is important at such a time; and
in this respect there is ample evidence that death scored no advantage
in the encounter, and that, though he took a spoil of bodies that had
been destined for him since the moment of their birth, he left the
hearts unconquered. In that last half-hour before the end, when every
one on the ship was under sentence of death, modern civilization went
through a severe test. By their bearing in that moment those fated men
and women had to determine whether, through the long years of peace and
increase of material comfort and withdrawal from contact with the cruder
elements of life, their race had deteriorated in courage and morale. It
is only by such great tests that we can determine how we stand in these
matters, and, as they periodically recur, measure our advance or
decline. And the human material there made the test a very severe one;
for there were people on the _Titanic_ who had so entrenched themselves
behind ramparts of wealth and influence as to have wellnigh forgotten
that, equally with the waif and the pauper, they were exposed to the
caprice of destiny; and who might have been forgiven if, in that awful
moment of realization, they had shown the white feather and given
themselves over to panic. But there is ample evidence that these men
stood the test equally as well as those whose occupation and training
made them familiar with the risks of the sea, to which they were
continu