ible for the passengers. If there is any
danger, they are the last to hear of it; if anything unpleasant happens
on board, such as an accident or a death, knowledge of it is kept from
as many of them as possible. Whatever may be happening, short of an
apparent and obvious extremity, it is the duty of the ship's company to
help the passenger to believe that he lives and moves and has his being
in a kind of Paradise, at the doors of which there are no lurking
dangers and in which happiness and pleasure are the first duties of
every inhabitant.

And who were the people who composed the population of this journeying
town? Subsequent events made their names known to us--vast lists of names
filling columns of the newspapers; but to the majority they are names
and nothing else. Hardly anyone living knew more than a dozen of them
personally; and try as we may it is very hard to see them, as their
fellow voyagers must have seen them, as individual human beings with
recognizable faces and characters of their own. Of the three hundred odd
first-class passengers the majority were Americans--rich and prosperous
people, engaged for the most part in the simple occupation of buying
things as cheaply as possible, selling them as dearly as possible, and
trying to find some agreeable way of spending the difference on
themselves. Of the three hundred odd second-class passengers probably
the majority were English, many of them of the minor professional
classes and many going either to visit friends or to take up situations
in the western world. But the thousand odd steerage passengers
represented a kind of Babel of nationalities, all the world in little,
united by nothing except poverty and the fact that they were in a
transition stage of their existence, leaving behind them for the most
part a life of failure and hopelessness, and looking forward to a new
life of success and hope: Jews, Christians, and Mohammedans,
missionaries and heathen, Russians, Poles, Greeks, Roumanians, Germans,
Italians, Chinese, Finns, Spaniards, English, and French--with a strong
contingent of Irish, the inevitable link in that melancholy chain of
emigration that has united Ireland and America since the Famine. But
there were other differences, besides those of their condition and
geographical distribution on the ship, that divided its inhabitants. For
the first-class passengers the world was a very small place, about which
many of them were accustomed to hurry i