On the rocks and the hard sea-sand.
The breakers were right beneath her bows
She drifted a dreary wreck,
And a whooping billow swept the crew
Like icicles from her deck."
Longfellow.
"Perhaps some human kindness still
May make amends for human ill."
Barry Cornwall.
As we have considered the growth of legislation upon the question of wrecking and wreckage, and contrasted the more civilized, but not perfect code, now existing, with the barbarous laws of days gone by, we may also, perhaps, well put in contrast the present character and action of our coast population, as a rule, with what they were in days more remote.