An Appeal on Behalf of our Seamen.

Now my task is nearly done.

I have shown you that what Mr. O'Dowd, the counsel of the Board of Trade, justly calls a "homicidal system," exists in our midst; that it is vain to look to underwriters for a remedy; that it is equally vain to expect it from the poor sailors themselves; that the ship-owners as a class have done all they can; and that, therefore, it is your duty, yours personally, and mine, to endeavour to apply a remedy.

I have also shown you that in extending to our fellow-men at sea the protection of the law we should not be setting a precedent, but should simply be following many precedents long established, only giving the sailors what we ashore have long enjoyed.

I have shown you the extent of the evil, examined its sources, distinguishing those requiring skilled treatment from those you can pronounce upon.

I have indicated to you the almost total change which will follow if we do our duty.

I have shown you how utterly groundless are all the objections urged against doing our simple duty; and, finally, that nearly all the ports are earnestly desirous of our assistance.

And now I'll tell you what I propose to do in the coming Session, and earnestly beg your assistance:—

I shall bring in a Bill providing for the compulsory survey of all merchant ships (the Newcastle proposal and mine are alike in effect, as you have seen), and providing also that no ship shall be allowed to proceed to sea overloaded, giving the ship-owner the choice of all existing scales, subject to approval by the Board of Trade.

Whether there will be a third clause, dealing with over-insurance, will depend upon the advice of practical men in the meantime. The sum for which a ship may fairly be assured must be a fixed sum per ton register, and the amount will necessarily vary with the ship's class, her age, rig, and material. It will be a work of time and difficulty to arrange schedules dealing with this point. I shall seek the best practical aid available, and if the thing can be accomplished on going into it, in time—well; if not, my Bill will only deal with overloading and rottenness; except this point,—the master must be made to return the number of hands he has on board on proceeding to sea, with a view to future legislation, if it is found necessary.

I shall also move an Address to the Crown,^* praying Her Majesty to issue a Royal Commission to inquire into the other sources of loss I have referred to, and into the general subject; but we must not allow even the issue of such a commission to delay legislation if we can help it on these two points, on which we are as able to pronounce as any commission, namely,—That ships unseaworthy by reason of want of repair shall not be allowed to go to sea unrepaired; and that ships shall not be overloaded.

With reference to the first point, I have this day heard (Dec. 13, 1872) of a very bad case. The owners of a ship (I am not at liberty to mention her name or her owners) applied to Lloyd's to have her classed. She was surveyed, and reported to be in a bad condition, two or three material defects being obvious. Lloyd's Committee refused to give her any class in her then condition; the owners pressed—the matter was gone into again. The Committee referred again to the surveyor. He said in reply, "She is utterly unfit to go to sea, unless the defects (specified) are attended to." The owners refused to lay out any money; she was refused classification. She was loaded in London, and went on her voyage to cross the Atlantic.

Going down the Thames the crew became aware of her state, and at Deal refused to proceed on the voyage. They were landed and taken to prison, and subsequently sentenced, one and all, to a long term of imprisonment in the county gaol. Another crew was obtained somehow, and the ship went on her voyage, and while the one set of men were in gaol, all the others went to the bottom of the sea, for she was never heard of again. I can give all particulars to a Royal Commission, as well as of several other cases, all of them just as bad.

Now you who read these pages—somebody shall read them, if I have to give away the whole edition—will you help me to put these things right? If you will, whether man or woman, write me just a line to 16, St. James's Street, London, S.W., to say so, and I will then say how you best can do so. There is little reason, I fear, for thinking my correspondence will be too heavy for me, for no one seems to care for the sailors; but write, and I shall be able, I dare say, to say what is best to be done in your case.

If our sailors were as bad as bad can be, if their labour was of no use to any of us, that would surely be no reason for permitting such a "homicidal system" (Mr. O'Dowd) to continue; but they are not bad, they are as brave and manly fellows as any class ashore, and they have wives and families to deplore and suffer for their loss.

I would with all my heart and soul that I possessed the eloquence of Bright, the graphic power of MM. Erckmann-Chatrian, to use in their behalf, for then you would surely be moved to action; but I have not, yet I may tell you why I feel so strongly on their behalf. If the lives of nearly a thousand of our ministers of religion, or of our lawyers, or of our doctors, or of our public men were sacrificed every year, to what a Government officer described as a "homicidal system," to pure and most culpable neglect, what would be said? All England would ring with indignation at the outrage; yet I page 8 venture to say, and I say it conscientiously, believing it to be true, that any thousand of what is called the working classes are as worthy of respect and affection as any of these. If honesty, if strong aversion to idleness, if tenderness to wife and children, if generosity to one another in adversity, and if splendid courage are claims to respect, I am not sure that, taking them as a whole, you can find these moral qualities in equal degree in any other class.

I don't wish to disparage the rich, but I think it may be reasonably doubted whether these qualities are so fully developed in them; for, notwithstanding that not a few of them are not unacquainted with the claims, reasonable and unreasonable, of poor relations, these qualities are not in such constant exercise; and riches seem in so many cases to smother the manliness of their possessors, and their sympathies become not so much narrowed as, so to speak, stratified—they are reserved for the sufferings of their own class, and the woes of those above them. They seldom tend downwards much, and they are far more likely to admire an act of high courage, like that of the engine-driver who saved his passengers lately from an awful collision by cool courage, than to admire the constantly exercised fortitude and the tenderness which are the daily characteristics of a British workman's life.

You may doubt this. I once should have done so myself, but I have shared their lot; I have lived with them. For months and months I lived in one of the model lodging-houses, established mainly by the efforts of Lord Shaftesbury—there is one in Fetter Lane, another in Hatton Garden, and indeed they are scattered all over London. I went there simply because I could not afford a better lodging. I have had to make 7s. 9 ½d. (3s. of which I paid for my lodging) last me a whole week, and did it. It is astonishing how little you can live on, when you divest yourself of all fanciful needs. I had plenty of good wheat bread to eat all the week, and the half of a herring for a relish (loss will do if you can't afford half, for it is a splendid fish), and good coffee to drink; and I know how much, or rather how little, roast shoulder of mutton you can get for 2d. for your Sunday's dinner. Don't suppose I went there from choice—I went of stern necessity (and this was promotion too), and I went with strong shrinking, with a sense of suffering great humiliation, regarding my being there as a thing to be carefully kept secret from all my old friends. In a word, I considered it only less degrading than spunging upon friends, or borrowing what I saw no chance of ever being able to pay.

Now what did I see there? I found the workmen considerate for each other. I found that they would go out (those who were out of employment) day after day, and patiently trudge miles and miles seeking employment, returning night after night unsuccessful and dispirited; only, however, to sally out the following morning with renewed determination. They would walk incredibly long distances, to places where they heard of a job of work; and this not for a few days, but for many, many days. And I have seen such a man sit down wearily by the fire (we had a common room for sitting and cooking everything), with a hungry, despondent look—he had not tasted food all day—and accosted by another, scarcely less poor than himself, with "Here, mate, get this into thee," handing him at the same time a piece of bread and some cold meat, and afterwards some coffee; and adding, "Better page 9 luck to-morrow; keep up your pecker." And all this without any idea that they were practising the most splendid patience, fortitude, courage, and generosity I had ever seen. You would hear them talk of absent wife and children sometimes—these in a distant workhouse (trade was very bad then)—with expressions of affection, and the hope of seeing them again soon; although the one was irreverently alluded to as "my old woman," and the latter as "the kids."

I very soon got rid of miserable self-pity there, and came to reflect that Dr. Livingstone would probably be thankful for good wheat bread; and, if the bed was of flock and hay, and the sheets of cotton, that better men than I in the Crimea (the war was going on then) would think themselves very lucky to have as good; and then, too, I began to reflect, that, when you come to think of it, such as these men were, so were the vast majority of the working classes; that the idle and the drunken we see about public-houses are but a small minority of them, made to appear more because public-houses are all put in such places; that the great bulk are at home—for the man who has to be at work at six in the morning can't stay up at night; he is in bed early, and is as I found my fellow-inmates. Now just consider: do you not—unconsciously, it may well be—still, do you not sometimes, in thinking of working men, picture those, few though they be, you see late at night about public-houses; not exclusively, perhaps, but rather more than of the ninety and nine who are at home with their families, recruiting their physical strength for the morrow's work? Well, it was impossible to indulge self-pity in circumstances like these, and, emulous of the genuine manhood all around me, I set to work again; for what might not be done with youth and health? and simply by preparing myself rather more thoroughly for my business than had previously been considered necessary, I was soon strong enough to live more in accordance with my previous life, and am now able to speak a true word for the genuine men I left behind, simply because my dear parents had given mo greater advantages than these men had had. But I did not leave all at once. I wanted to learn the lesson well; and, though I went reluctantly, I remained voluntarily, because the kindly feelings I took with me had changed into hearty respect and admiration, and I was busy thinking, for some things I thought I knew before appeared in a new and different aspect—for instance, I knew when the explosion took place at the Warren Vale Colliery, that, as a member of the relief committee formed in Sheffield, I had found that the claims upon the funds had not been limited to the wives and children of the poor men killed; but we found that in several instances the men killed had supported widowed mothers, and in others younger brothers and sisters, who had with themselves been deprived of fathers by some preceding accident. And, again, at the Lund Hill explosion this was the case too—nearly one-third of the men killed, as the respective committees can testify, were thus supporting relations others than wife or child.

Have you reflected what this is? Rich men, even comfortably-to-do men, do this, I don't doubt. But consider the difference; in one case it is simply signing a cheque, and mayhap leaving rather less behind him; in the other, it is perhaps having rather less to spend on what, after all, perhaps is fore page 10 gone without any personal discomfort; but in the case of the collier every shilling thus spared means more than an hour's hard work, lying nearly naked on his side in a solitary benk or heading far away from the pit-bottom, with his life literally in the keeping of each one of all the many men working in the pit.

I also thought a little more of the subscriptions of the men I had generally managed at the brewery where I was employed before I came to London to seek my fortune. And the more I thought, the more I wondered at the readiness with which men earning 16s. per week, and a cottage, and having a wife, and, in some cases, five and seven children, would spare 1s. each to help a dead comrade's widow, or 6d. to help a fellow-workman to defray the extra expense of a funeral in his family. Fancy what a sum 1s. is in such circumstances!

I thought, too, of the wonderful courage—more: of the real and wonderful heroism of the working men in circumstances of peril—deadly peril—at Edmund's Main Colliery explosion, when nearly two hundred men perished. After the first explosion, and a second was expected every moment, there was some doubt whether all in the pit were killed. "Who volunteers to go down to search?" is asked. Instantly, and without any knowledge apparently that the act was out of the common way, three times the number of men wanted stepped forward and went down. They never came up again alive, poor fellows, for a second explosion came, and the brave and gallant men, though their faces and hands wore black, vindicated their courage with their lives.

Again, when the last explosion took place at the Oaks Colliery, and it was thought some might be living below, when my dear friend, Parkin Jeffcock, held up his hand, and said, "Well, lads, who goes down With me?" (that's the place of an English gentleman), more than double the number he wanted quickly stepped out of the crowd. God help me, I fear I should not have the like courage in like circumstances, for a second explosion was so imminent that, having selected his men, the rest were ordered to fall back from the pit's mouth, lest they should be blown into the air. You know they never came up again. Poor fellows! Poor Jeffcock! it was a death worthy of envy, almost as much as Cobden's life was.

Who forgets Joe Rodgers, the plain seaman, who, with a thin cord made fast to his body, sprang from the deck of the Royal Charter, on the chance that he might be dashed on the shore with life enough to establish the line which was stretched from ship to shore, and which saved nearly forty lives? or the sailor who, when the Sailors' Home, which the late Prince Albert assisted to build in Liverpool, was ablaze, and the ladders were all too short to reach the highest floor, where the sailors were shut up by the fire, took one ladder, with the bottom rung resting on the bend of his right arm, and, pushing it up before him, mounted to the top of another, and thus, at the extreme peril of his own life (for had the imprisoned sailors not come down one at once all would have been killed), saved the lives of five men?

Can we forget the common soldiers, too, who, when the Birkenhead was lost, went down to death, shoulder to shoulder, having to the last kept their ranks to form a pathway of safety for the women and children?

and had also become more fully aware than I was before, how great and how glorious a thing it is to be born an Englishman. And yet these are the men we leave, shamefully leave, to perish by the dozen, by the score, without an effort to save them—allow them to perish from causes which could be remedied before the winter of 1873, and yet make no effort.

Do you want to know more about the sort of men who thus are cut off in their full manhood? Do you want to know how their loss is felt? Come with me a few minutes, and I'll show you. The initials are all strictly correct, both those indicating names and also those giving addresses, and I can produce all the people. In this house, No. 9, L——11 Street, lives Mrs. A——r R——e. Look at her; she is not more than two or three-and-twenty, and those two little ones are hers. She has a mangle you see. It was subscribed for by her poor neighbours—the poor are very kind to each other. That poor little fellow has hurt his foot, and looks wonderingly at the tearful face of his young mother. She had a loving husband but very lately; but the owner of the ship, the S——n, on which he served, was a very needy man, who had insured her for nearly £3,000 more than she had cost him; so, if she sank, he would gain all this. Well, one voyage she was loaded under the owner's personal superintendence; she was loaded so deeply that the dock-master pointed her out to a friend as she left the dock, and said emphatically, "That ship will never reach her destination." She never did, but was lost with all hands, twenty men and boys. A——R——complained to her before she sailed, that the ship was "so deep loaded." She tried to get to the sands to see the ship off with Mrs. S——r, whoso husband also was on board. They never saw their husbands again.

In this most evil-smelling room E——Q——, C——Street, you may see in the corner two poor women in one bed, stricken with fever (one died two days after I saw them), mother and daughter. The husband of the daughter, who maintained them both, had been lost at sea a little while before—with a ship so loaded that when Mr. B——1, a Custom-House officer, who had to go on board for some reason as she was lying in the river, on asking whereabouts the ship was, was told, "She's yonder; you can easily find her; she's nearly over t' head in water." Mr. B——I told me, "I asked no questions, but stepped on board. This description was quite sufficient."

Mrs. R——s, 14, H——n Place, told me her young brother was an orphan with herself. She and her sister had brought him up until she was married. Then her husband was kind to him, and apprenticed him to the sea. He had passed as second mate in a sailing ship; but (he was a fine young fellow : I page 12 have his portrait) he was ambitious to "pass in steam" also; engaged to serve in the S——ship, leaking badly, but was assured on signing that she was to be repaired before loading. The ship was not repaired, and was loaded, as he told his sister-mother, "like a sand-barge." Was urged by his sister, and also her husband, not to go. His sister again urged him, as he passed her bedroom door in the morning, not to go. He promised he wouldn't, and went to the ship to get the wages due to him. Was refused payment unless he went; was over-persuaded, and threatened, and called a coward, which greatly excited him. He went; and two days afterwards the ship went down.

Her husband, Mr. R——s, also told me that he and his wife "had a bit crack," and decided to do all they could to "persuade Johnnie not to go." The young man was about twenty-two.

Mr. J——H——1 told me that the captain was his friend, and the captain was very "down-hearted about the way she was loaded" (mind, she was loaded under the owner's personal supervision). The captain asked him (Mr. A——) to see his wife off by train after the ship had sailed. She, poor soul! had travelled to that port to see him off. Captain said to him, "I doubt I'll never see her more!" and burst out crying. Poor fellow! he never did see her more.

Now come with me to 36, C——Street, and see Mrs. J——s R——e. She is a young woman of superior intelligence, and has a trustable face—very. She may be about twenty-seven. She lost her husband in the same ship. He was thirty years of age, and, to use her own words, "such a happy creature, full of his jokes." He was engaged as second engineer at £110s. and board. "After his ship was loaded he was a changed man, he got his tea without saying a word, and then sat looking into the fire in a deep study like. I asked him what hailed him, and he said, more to himself than me, 'She's such a beast!' I thought he meant the men's place was dirty, as he had complained before that there was nowhere for the men to wash. He liked to be clean, my husband, and always had a good wash when he came home from the workshop, when he worked ashore. So I said, 'Will you let me come aboard to clean it for ye?' and he said, still looking at the fire, 'It isn't that.' Well, he hadn't signed, only agreed, so I said, 'Don't sign, Jim;' and he said he wouldn't, and went and told the engineer he shouldn't go. The engineer 'spoke so kindly to him,' and offered him 10s. a month more. He'd had no work for a long time, and the money was tempting," she said, "so he signed. When he told me, I said, 'Oh! Jim, you won't go, will you?' He said, 'Why, hinnie, hinnie, they'll put me in gaol if I don't.' I said, 'Never mind, ye can come home after that.' 'But,' said he, 'they'll call me a coward, and ye wouldn't like to hear me called that.'"

The poor woman was crying very bitterly, so I said gently, "I hope you won't think I'm asking all these questions from idle curiosity;" and I shall never forget her quick disclaimer, for she saw that I was troubled with her—

"On no, sir, I am glad to answer you; for so many homes might be spared being made desolate if it was only looked into."

I ascertained that she is now "getting a bit winning for a livelihood," as my informant phrased it (of course I was not so rude as to ask her that), by sewing for a ready-made clothes shopkeeper. She was in a small garret, page 13 with a sloping roof, and the most modest fireplace I ever saw—just three bits of iron laid from side to side of an opening in the brick-work, and two more up the front; no chimney-piece, or jambs, or stone across the top, but just the bricks laid nearer and nearer until the courses united. So I don't fancy she could be earning much. But with the very least money value in the place, it was as beautifully c ean as I ever saw a room in my life.

I saw also Mrs. W——ks, of 78, B——d Street, who had lost her son, Henry W——ks, aged twenty-two. She too cried bitterly as she spoke with such love and pride of her son, and of the grief of his father, who was sixty years of age. Her son was taken on as stoker, and worked in the ship some days before she was ready for sea. He didn't want to go then, when he saw how she was loaded; but they refused to pay him the money he had earned unless he went; and he too was lost with all the others.

Just one more specimen of the good, true, and brave men we sacrifice by our most cruel and manslaughtering neglect, and then I will go on to the next part of my subject.

This time I went to 17, D——h Street, and called upon old J——n P——r, and after apologizing for intruding upon his grief, I asked him if he had any objection to telling me whether his son had had any misgivings about the ship before he went. He said, "Yes. I went to see the ship myself, and I was horrified to see the way she was loaded. She looked like a floating wreck; and I tried all I could to persuade him not to go; but he'd been doing nothing for a long time, and he didn't like being a burden on me. He'd a fine 'sperrit,' sir, had my son," said the poor old man.

Here a young woman I had not observed (she was in a corner, with her face to the wall) broke out into loud sobs, and said, "He was the best of us all, sir—the best in the whole family. He was as fair as a flower, vah-y canny-looking."

Oh! my God! my God! what can I say, what can I write, to make the people take thought on this terrible wrong?

I tell you, you who read these lines, if you are a man, you deserve to perish suddenly, lacking sympathy and succour in your hour of utmost need, and leaving your nearest and dearest only the cold charity of the world to depend upon—for this is how sailors die—if you don't help. If you are a wife, you deserve that your husband should be taken from you without warning, and that to the anguish of bereavement should be added the material miseries of hunger and destitution—for this is how sailors' wives suffer—if you do not help. If you are a father, descending it may be into the vale of years, with sons strong and brave, the pride and support of your age, you deserve that they should suddenly perish with no hand to help them, leaving your remaining years uncheered by one filial greeting—for so the fathers of sailors are bereaved—if you do not help. If you are a mother, you deserve that your son should be taken from you in the pride of his young manhood, if you don't help to stop this homicidal, this manslaughtering, this widow-and-orphan manufacturing system.

Fellow Christians, have you nothing to say to this? Do you think that there are no religious sailors—no followers of our common Lord and Saviour page 14 amongst them? Oh, but you are greatly mistaken. There is more true religion amongst miners and sailors than you are aware.

Don't you recollect the miner at the Hartley accident who slid down the guide-rods, knowing he could not get up again for days it might be, that he might pray with and for his companions who were below the broken engine-beam, and who could never more see the light?

Do you forget the loving husband who in that horrible pit, face to face with death, scratched with his knife on a breakfast can a message of love to his wife Sarah?

and wondering how it was that these brave men were so entirely friendless—how it was that they alone of British subjects should have been abandoned to the tender mercies of unchecked irresponsibility—of competition run mad.

Have you no word to say when you are shown, on evidence you cannot doubt, that your fellow Christians are sent down to death, and their wives made widows, their children fatherless, when you could prevent it by the simple expression of your will? Oh! shame, shame! how will you answer to the Master for it, when you and they stand at length before Him?

Fellow Loyalists,—You who are thankful for the inestimable blessings of a settled government, and who are unwilling that this glorious England of ours should incur the tremendous loss of dignity which would ensue from having the highest person in the nation subjected to all the abuse which malignity page 15 and falsehood can allege or invent, every four years, and who are, besides being loyal, deeply attached to our good Queen: I call upon you to help, for I feel absolutely sure she would, if she should ever hear how the matter stands. You cannot forget how she telegraphed, day after day, while there was any hope of rescuing the poor men who were interred alive in the Hartley Colliery.

Working men, is it nothing to you that your fellow-workmen, fathers of families, men to whom life is as dear as it is to yourselves, men who have committed no fault, should thus shamefully be neglected? should thus be drowned by the dozen and the score to make a few bad men richer?—and that their needless deaths should not elicit an inquiry into the cause of it? I hate to appeal to class feelings or prejudices, but class jealousy can only be allayed by justice, not by ignoring murderous wrong; and I ask, seriously and sadly, can any one doubt but that, if these brave men had been pigs or sheep, the Legislature had long since been compelled by powerful advocates to stop such losses? Pigs and sheep are property, and property is well represented in Parliament; but these—why, they are only our poor brothers, and no one speaks for them.

You who are members of societies can help best by calling upon your secretaries to organize a public meeting or demonstration in favour of the passing of the Merchant Shipping Survey Bill this Session. Do this, if you are men.

I do not wish to represent Parliament as indifferent to the interests of working men. On the contrary, it is impossible to contemplate the fiscal legislation of the past twenty years without gratefully acknowledging on their behalf its unselfish, nay, more, its self-denying character; but, when no pressing demand is made for the remedy of social wrong, its removal is postponed to those matters which are pressed. Parliament will act readily enough if people out of doors make it a prominent question; and so thoroughly am I satisfied on this point, that I begin to doubt whether I was right in trying to get into Parliament with the object of getting this done. It seems to me at least doubtful whether I should not have done better to have endeavoured to rouse people out of doors to the urgency of the matter. At any rate, on this I have decided, that if, during the coming Session, I again fail to obtain at least a Royal Commission to inquire into the subject, I will restore to my constituents the high trust they confided to me, and will then, as God may help me, and with such fellow-workers as I may find, go from town to town, and tell the story of the sailors' wrongs. For, if the working men of Sheffield, Leeds, Birmingham, and Manchester only demand justice for these poor men, the thing is done. The working men of Derby have done their part, for when, moved by the sailors' wrongs, I asked them to send me to Parliament to seek for justice, they sent me by over 2,000 majority.

Gentlemen of the Press,—Your great power and influence have always been exercised on behalf of the oppressed. Nor has their inability to even thank you stayed the generous exercise of your power, else one might despair of these men, for they are politically perfectly helpless; they can neither threaten a ministry nor offer a contingent to the opposition; they are not even page 16 your supporters as readers, for, divided into small groups of a dozen or a score, they spend their lives for the most part far away at sea, and know not, even if they were able to invoke it, how great is the help you can give them. This will not render you less willing to help them, their case understood, and I have diligently done my poor best to gather for you the materials for forming a judgment on it.

Help them, then, I pray you, and you too shall be helped by the recollection of your brotherly aid when that hour comes when you will need the help of Him that sticketh closer than a brother. Consider how not only are the sailors' lives sacrificed, not only are many, very many of their wives made widows, but what a clouded life all their wives lead from well-grounded and constant apprehension, which, deeply depressing at all times, knows no other variation than the quick agony into which those apprehensions are aroused whenever the wind rises oven to a moderate gale.

Whoever you are who read this, help the poor sailors, for the love of God. If you are a man of influence, call a meeting and confer on this Appeal; if you are not, and will write to mo, I will try to show you how to help.

If you refuse—but this I cannot think—but if you refuse or neglect to use your influence, before another year has run its course at least five hundred—five hundred men!—now in life, will strew the bottom of the sea with their dead, unburied, unresting bodies, and desolation and woe will have entered many and many a now happy home; but if you do render your help, we can secure such life-preserving activity in precautionary measures that the sailor will have no fear; and then the storms of winter may come, but with good tight ships under them, and sound gear to their hands, their own strong arms and stout hearts can do the rest; and as after a night of storm and tempest, which but for your fraternal care would have overwhelmed them in death and sent bereavement and anguish into their humble homes, they reach their desired haven, weary and worn it may be, but still safe—chilled to the marrow, but still alive—the blessings of those who are ready to perish shall be yours: nor shall there be lacking to you those richer blessings promised by the Great Father of us all, to those who visit the widow and fatherless, for that, to the high and the noble and the sacred duty of visiting them in their affliction, you have preferred the higher, the nobler, and the yet more sacred duty of saving women and children from so sad a fate.