38 Among Men and Horses. 



Grand Surrey Canal, a juryman asks: 'Was there no one 

 near when deceased first sank ? — Witness : Yes, I saw at 

 least twenty young men standing on the towing-path. — A 

 juryman : What were they doing ?— Witness : Looking on, 

 like a lot of cowards. Any one of them could have saved 

 the lad had they tried.' At a similar inquest held on the 

 same day, we learn from a witness that ' When he got there 

 there was a mob of people looking on, but " not a solitary 

 soul " tried to save the lad.' On reading such cases, which 

 are no isolated ones, we might be justified in thinking that 

 these people were devils, not men. And yet the fault is more 

 from lack of ability to take the initiative and from want of 

 training, than from badness of heart ; for such dastards of 

 circumstances are recruited from the same class that gave 

 us the heroes of Balaclava, of the BirkenJiead, and of the 

 Victoria. However much we may talk of free will, we can- 

 not get over the fact that men are gregarious animals, and 

 that the proportion, among them, of bell-wethers is extremely 

 small. Bravery en masse comes almost as easy to us as whole- 

 sale cowardice. Some men of the masterful kind are not gre- 

 garious and take their own ' line ' without effort. Others, by 

 dint of strenuous effort, succeed in freeing themselves from 

 the trammels imposed upon them by the nature of their being. 

 I once knew a ship's captain who, on the occasion of the 

 vessel of which he was in command being wrecked, behaved 

 with conspicuous and brutal cowardice. By an extraordinary 

 piece of luck he got another ship, which also was wrecked ; 

 but instead of repeating his former conduct, in this instance, 

 he was the means, by his self-sacrificing heroism, of saving 

 many lives. The owners of the lost craft, to mark their grati- 

 tude, put him in command of a third ship, which, in course of 

 time, followed the fate of its predecessors. Again the captain 

 courted death in heroic efforts to save others, and acted so 

 nobly and unselfishly that the entire English press rang with 

 the praises of his bravery. 



To get a proper estimate of people, we ought, I think, to 



