ourselves, and to give ourselves generously for what we have and what we
have had. We have to meet the challenge of this distrust.

The slack days for rulers and owners are over. If there are still to be
rulers and owners and managing and governing people, then in the face of
the new masses, sensitive, intelligent, critical, irritable, as no
common people have ever been before, these rulers and owners must be
prepared to make themselves and display themselves wise, capable and
heroic--beyond any aristocratic precedent. The alternative, if it is an
alternative, is resignation--to the Social Democracy.

And it is just because we are all beginning to realise the immense need
for this heroic quality in those who rule and are rich and powerful, as
the response and corrective to these distrusts and jealousies that are
threatening to disintegrate our social order, that we have all followed
the details of this great catastrophe in the Atlantic with such intense
solicitude. It was one of those accidents that happen with a precision
of time and circumstance that outdoes art; not an incident in it all
that was not supremely typical. It was the penetrating comment of chance
upon our entire social situation. Beneath a surface of magnificent
efficiency was--slap-dash. The third-class passengers had placed
themselves on board with an infinite confidence in the care that was to
be taken of them, and they went down, and most of their women and
children went down with the cry of those who find themselves cheated out
of life.

In the unfolding record of behaviour it is the stewardesses and bandsmen
and engineers--persons of the trade-union class--who shine as brightly
as any. And by the supreme artistry of Chance it fell to the lot of that
tragic and unhappy gentleman, Mr. Bruce Ismay, to be aboard and to be