Dec. 16.
Tue news conveyed in the latest telegrams to the effect that there is good reason to believe that both passengers and crew of the Delhi are safe will be received with the utmost satisfaction. In circumstances of extreme peril, when all night long mountainous waves were breaking over the vessel, all concerned appear to have behaved with the calm courage on which, in an emergency, so mach depends. That the conduct of the officers and crew on this occasion was only in accordance with the best traditions of the British merchant service is no reason why it should be passed over in silence. For the state of mind of the passengers, at such a time, must depend to no small extent on the attitude of those in whom familiarity with the dangers of the soa has bred, not contempt, but the power to estimate the nature of the peril and to take all haman measures possible to meet it, The catastrophe, unbappily, has been attended by loss of life, the lives of four French sailors from the cruiser Friant, whose launch after tremendous efforts on the part of the crew, transferred a number of the passengers to H. M, S. Duke of Edinburgh. Their gallant response to the wireless message sent out from the wrecked vessel will, feel sure, be appreciated at its true posed a worth by the British Government: and people. The spectacle of the French sailors working side by side with their British confreres for the rescue of a British royal party strikes the imagination as a tres and cly link in the bond of friendship between the two nations. Assuredly France has repaid in full, by the actual sacrifice of lives, a debt of gratitude for the sympathy that was powerless to avert, and could only lament, the recent terrible disaster to the Liberté.
From time to time some terrible calamity, by sea or land, impresses upon the public the dangers i separable from travel. The i fluence of progress and of modern science has, it may be urged, reduced those dangers to a mum. Bat man's ingenuity has not yet emerged invariably triamphant from the struggle with the forces of Nature. The number of! disasters has, of course, been decreased, at all events on sea, by the introduction of steam and by the improved construction and morea ed size of modern sea-going vessels. Wireless telegraphy, submarine
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.