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will no longer stand by and permit the gross violation of their public duty to take place from day to day as it is now doing in this District and elsewhere. What occurs here, occurs all around us, and I call upon Congress, taught the lesson as it is by this terrible disaster, to fix the standard and the measure of responsibility, not against sailors and captains and conductors and brakemen and motormen, unless where they are personally negligent, but upon the heads of these corporations, where the responsibility attaches to them for the proper direction and management of the interests that they represent.

There is another lesson, however, Mr. President, that this disaster has taught us, of more importance than a change in our admiralty and navigation laws, and of far greater and more overwhelming significance than the lesson of corporate responsibility. That is the lesson of religious faith. Disasters like this, instead of weakening, should strengthen the faith of the Nation. There is no use of appealing to reason or to the philosophy in a case of this sort. The mind stands aghast and appalled as these calamities come thick and fast. We forget in our moments of sorrow that it never was intended that the intellect of man should reason out such a problem. Suffering and affliction, as they come to the pure and the innocent in a hundred forms, are inexplainable.

The convulsions of nature alone that have swept myriads of human beings to an untimely death can not be reconciled by any process of human reasoning. When reason halts, the Creator has implanted in the soul another faculty, however, that gives us light in the hours of tribulations. It is the light of faith, a pillar of fire in the night of our darkness and despair. Throughout my life I have spent many hours of the day, and many silent and sleepless hours of the night, in the struggle for the light of reason, but in my advancing years the light that gives me fortitude and courage is the sublime light of faith, that never dims nor wanes, and at the supreme moment,

when reason vanishes, breaks in upon us with all the radiance of the morning sun.

We can reason out the negligence of man, but we can not reason out why, in the course of nature, an iceberg from the Arctic Zone should just at this very moment have taken its course upon the path of desolation and of death. Upon all this and kindred subjects the most profound intellect of the greatest philosophers who ever lived have illumined the world just about as much as the credulity of the earliest races, who attributed every phenomenon of nature to the interposition of Divine Providence. What this Nation

needs are some severe lessons that will strengthen the pillars and the altars of its faith. We are to a large extent today, defying the ordinances of God, and the sooner we awaken to a realizing sense of our responsibility the better it will be for the spiritual elevation of the country. We are running mad with the lust of wealth, and of power, and of ambition. We are separating society into casts, with fabulous fortunes upon the one side and destitution and poverty on the other. It takes a terrible warning to bring us back to our moorings and our senses. We are abandoning the devout and simple lives of our ancestors, and the fabric of our firesides is weakening at the foundation. If this disaster teaches no lesson or points no moral, then let us pass it by with stoical indifference, until the next disaster comes, and in the meantime let the carnival go on. May the heart-rending scenes upon this night of anguish and of woe give us faith and lead us back to the altars of our fathers. I will not rehease the agonies of this midnight sacrifice. I can not afford to dwell upon them or listen to the details that almost distract the mind and break the heart. It is the lesson and the moral that I am searching for.

I will say this, however, in closing: The agonies of separation at this scene, that palsy the tongue when it attempts to describe them, were worse than the agonies of death. I knew

well one of the courageous passengers who, with his wife, yielded up their lives on this occasion. The man was a splendid type of American citizenship. I served with him in the House of Representatives, and he was esteemed and beloved by by all who knew him. In private life he was a benefactor of the human race. In public life he was an unpurchasable tribune of the people. His heroic wife had the blood of martyrs in her veins, and from the most authentic account that I can obtain, the account of a witness who was not examined by the committee, because her testimony was not necessary for the purposes of the investigation, she went to her death with the same spirit of heroic fortitude with which her ancestors went to the fagot and the flame.

A harrowing thought flashes across my mind, and that is, it might possibly have been unnecessary to have presented to this devoted man and woman the terrible alternative that confronted them, and it might have been possible that both of them could have been rescued. I shall dwell upon this incident no longer.

I shall close my brief remarks with this remembrance. As the ship was sinking the strains of music were wafted over the deck. It was not the note of any martial anthem that had, in days gone by, led embattled legions on to victory. It was a more inspiring stanza than this. It was a loftier and holier melody amid the anguish and the sublime pathos of that awful hour that swept through the compartments of the sinking ship. It was a rallying cry for the living and the dying to rally them not for life, but to rally them for their awaiting death. Almost face to face with their Creator, amid the chaos of this supreme and solemn moment, in inspiring notes, the unison resounded through the ship. It told the victims of the wreck that there was another world beyond the seas, free from the agony of pain, and, though with sombre tones, it cheered them on to their untimely fate. As the sea

closed upon the heroic dead, let us feel that the heavens opened to the lives that were prepared to enter.

Father of the Universe, what an admonition to the Nation! The sounds of that awe-inspiring requiem that vibrated o'er the ocean have been drowned in the waters of the deep. The instruments that gave them birth are silenced as the harps were silenced on the willow tree. But if the melody that was rehearsed could only reverberate through this land, “Nearer, My God, to Thee," and its echoes could be heard in these halls of legislation, and at every place where our rulers and representatives pass judgment and enact and administer laws, and at every home and fireside, from the mansions of the rich to the huts and hovels of the poor, and if we could be made to feel that there is a divine law of obedience and of adjustment, and of compensation that should command our allegiance, far above the laws that we formulate in this presence; then, from the gloom of these fearful hours we shall pass into the dawn of a higher service and of a better day, and then, Mr. President, the lives that went down on this fated night did not go down in vain.

INCREASING THE PENSION OF MRS. SCHLEY.

Senator Rayner's last effort on the floor of the Senate was an address to that body on June 3, 1912, demanding that justice be done the widow of the gallant officer to whom his government, a decade before, had denied justice.

Mr. President, my bill is entitled "A bill granting an increase of pension to Annie R. Schley," and it provides:

That the Secretary of the Interior be, and he is hereby, authorized and directed to place on the pension roll, subject to the provisions and limitations of the pension laws, the name of Annie R. Schley, widow of Winfield S. Schley, late rear admiral, United States Navy, and pay her a pension at the rate of $150 per month in lieu of that she is now receiving.

The committee reported $50 a month, and my motion to amend will be to increase the pension to $150 a month, as in the bill I originally introduced.

Mr. President, in offering this amendment to the bill of the Pension Committee, asking $150 a month for the widow of Admiral Schley instead of $50 a month as allowed by the committee, I desire to say that I have no comment whatever to make upon the action of the committee. With the committee it is a matter largely of precedent and of rules and regulations. With us in the Senate I apprehend it will be a matter of patriotism and impartial justice. It is really a pittance that I am asking for the widow of Admiral Schley in her comfortless and declining years. I do not regard it exactly in the light of a pension, because it is beyond that, a recognition of the memorable services that this gallant officer performed for his country at so many stations and places that it would be almost impossible to enumerate them in the brief presentation that I am making to the Senate. One thing is sure, and that is that if this amendment is adopted it will meet from one end of the Union to the other with the commendation of our countrymen.

Admiral Schley was esteemed during his life by all who knew him personally, and admired by hundreds of thousands who did not know him personally, and now, in death, there is not even in bated breath a whisper of enmity upon the part of those who were hostile to him during his life.

Mr. President, we pay nearly $200,000,000 a year in pensions. Is there a patriot in the land, or in any section of it, who will criticise an allotment to his surviving widow of $150 a month? As the report shows, she is in dire need of it, and if she did not need it, I would not be here asking for it on her behalf at the hands of an American Congress. She is without the means to erect a suitable memorial upon his grave. Just think of it. Would any other country on this earth deny

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