I long ago came to the conclusion that the real heroes of the world were on the sea. The ambitions of men crowded together on land were incontestably disgusting. On the vast, restless deep men stand alone, in brave conflict with constant danger. I was always deeply impressed by the character of men, as revealed in disasters of the sea. There were many of them during my life-time. The bigger the ships grew, the more dangerous became ocean travel. Our improvements seemed to add to the humour of grim old Neptune. In 1884 the ocean was becoming a great turnpike road, and people were required by law to keep to the right or to the left. A population of a million sailors was on the sea at all times. Some of the ships were too busy to stop to save human lives, as was the case in the disaster of the "Florida." In distress, her captain hailed "The City of Rome," a monster of the deep. But "The City of Rome" had no time to stop, and passed on by. The lifeboats of the "Florida" were useless shells, utterly unseaworthy. The "Florida" was unfit for service. John Bayne, the engineer, was the hero who lost his life to save others. But this was becoming a common story of the sea; for when the "Schiller" went down, Captain Thomas gave his life for others. When the "Central-America" sank, President Arthur's father-in-law perished in the same way. Every shipwreck I have known seems lighted up with some marvellous deed of heroism in man.
In 1884 there was a failure in Wall Street for eight or ten million dollars, and hundreds went down during this shipwreck. By heroism and courage alone were they able to outlive it. To whom did all this money belong? To those who were drowned in the storm of financial sea. But it was only a Wall Street flurry; it did not affect the national ship as it would have done twenty years before. The time had passed when Wall Street could jeopardise the commerce of the country. Twenty years before, such a calamity in three days' time would have left all the business of the nation in the dust. It would have crashed down all the banks, the insurance companies, the stock-houses. New York, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, New Orleans—from coast to coast, everything would have tumbled down.
The principal lesson derived from this panic was to keep excitable men out of Wall Street. While the romance of a failure for hundreds of thousands of dollars is more appealing than a failure for a small sum, the greater the deficit the greater the responsibility. Ferdinand Ward was in this Wall Street crash of 1883. The roseate glasses of wealth through which he saw the world had made him also see millions in every direction. George L. Seney lost his bank and railroad stock in this failure, but he had given hundreds of thousands to the cause of education, North and South. Some people regretted that he had not kept his fortune to help him out of his trouble. I believe there were thousands of good people all over the country who prayed that this philanthropist might be restored to wealth. There was one man in Wall Street at this time who I said could not fail. He was Mr. A.S. Hatch, President of the New York Stock Exchange. He had given large sums of money to Christian work, and was personally an active church member.
That which I hear about men who are unfortunate makes no impression on me. There is always a great jubilee over the downfall of a financier. I like to put the best phase possible upon a man's misfortune. No one begrudged the wealth of the rich men of the past.
The world was becoming too compressed, it was said; there was not room enough to get away from your troubles. All the better. It was getting to a compactness that could be easily poked up and divinely appropriated. A new cable was landed at Rockport, Mass., that was to bring the world into closer reunion of messages. We were to have cheaper cable service under the management of the Commercial Cable Company. Simultaneously with this information, the s.s. "America" made the astounding record of a trip from shore to shore of the Atlantic, in six days fourteen hours and eighteen minutes. It was a startling symbol of future wonders. I promised then to exchange pulpits with any church in England once a month. It seemed a possibility, as proposed in Mr. Corbin's scheme of harbours at Montauk Point. There were pauses in the breathless speed we were just beginning at this time. We paused to say farewell to the good men whom we were passing by. They were not spectacular. Some of them will no doubt be unknown to the reader.
A gentle old man, his face illumined always by a radiant smile, fell behind. He was Bishop Simpson. We paused to bid him farewell. In 1863, walking the streets of Philadelphia one night with an army surgeon, we passed the Academy of Music in that city, where a meeting was being held on behalf of the Christian Commission, the object of which was to take care of wounded soldiers. As we stood at the back of the stage listening, the meeting seemed to be very dull. A speaker was introduced. His voice was thin, his manner unimpressive. My friend said, "Let's go," but I replied, "Wait until we see what there is in him." Suddenly, he grew upon us. The address became adorned with a pathos, a sublimity, and an enthusiasm that overwhelmed the audience. When the speaker sat down, I inquired who he was.
"That is Bishop Simpson," said my informant. In later years, I learned that the Bishop's address that night was the great hour of his life. His reputation became national. He was one of the few old men who knew how to treat young men. He used no gestures on the platform, no climaxes, no dramatic effects of voice, yet he was eloquent beyond description. His earnestness broke over and broke through all rules of rhetoric. He made his audiences think and feel as he did himself. That, I believe, is the best of a man's inner salvation.
In the autumn of the same year we paused to close the chapters of Jerry McCauley's life, a man who had risen from the depths of crime and sin—a different sort of man from Bishop Simpson. He was born in the home of a counterfeiter. He became a thief, an outlaw. By an influence that many consider obsolete and old-fashioned, he became converted, and was recognised by the best men and women in New York and Brooklyn. I knew McCauley. I stood with him on the steps of his mission in Water Street. He was a river thief changed into an angel. It was supernatural, a miracle. McCauley gave twelve years to his mission work. Two years before his death he changed his quarters, converting a dive into a House of God. What an imbecile city government refused to touch was surrendered to hosannas and doxologies. The story of Jerry McCauley's missionary work in the heart of a wicked section of New York was called romantic. I attest that I am just as keenly sensitive to the beauty of romance as any human being, but there was a great deal that was called romantic in American life in 1884-1885 that was not so. Romance became a roseate mist, through which old and young saw the obligations of life but dimly.
A strange romance of marriage became epidemic in America at this time. European ethics were being imported, and the romance of European liberty swept over us. A parental despotism was responsible. The newspapers of the summer of 1884 were full of elopements. They were long exciting chapters of domestic calamity. My sympathies were with the young fellow of seven hundred dollars income, married to a millionaire fool who continually informed him how much better her position was before she left home; the honeymoon a bliss of six months, and all the rest of his life a profound wish that he had never been born; his only redress the divorce court or the almshouse. The poetry of these elopements was false, the prose that came after was the truth. Marriage is an old-fashioned business, and that wedding procession lasts longest that starts not down the ladder out of the back window, but from the front door with a benediction.
But, morally and politically, we were in a riot of opinion against which I constantly protested. Politically, we were without morals.