" Then the youngster coldly, gravely
told of his surgical work, and it seemed as if he were drawing an
inexorable steel edge across the nerves of his terrified hearers. He
watched the impression spread, and then sprang at his peroration with
lightning-footed tact. "We English are like barbarians who have been
transferred from a chilly land to a kind of hot-house existence. We are
too secure; no predatory creature can harm us, and we cultivate the
lordlier and lazier vices. Our middle class, as Bismarck says, has 'gone
to fat,' and is too slothful to look for the miseries of others. The
middle-class man, and even the aristocrat, are both too content to think
of looking beyond their own horizon. And yet we are good in essentials,
and no tale of pity is unheeded--if only it be called forth loudly
enough. Let us wake our languid rich folk. They suffer from a
surfeit--an apoplexy--of money. An eager, wakeful, nervous American
plutocrat, thinks nothing of giving a large fortune to endow a hospital
or an institute for some petty Western town. Are we meaner or more
griping than the Americans? Never. Our men only want to know. Here is a
work for you. I do not call our fishermen stainless; they are rude, they
are stormy in passions, they are lacking in self-control; but they are
worth helping. It is not fitting that these lost children of
civilization should draw their breath in pain. Help us to heal their
bodies, and maybe you will see a day when their strength will be your
succour, and when their rescued souls shall be made in a glory of good
deeds and manly righteousness.
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