There was "no bitterness, no complaint, only a great and eager desire to help some one less fortunate." Another observer said: "I have never seen such kindly feeling. I have never seen such tender sympathy. I have never heard an impatient word." And this was amongst men "who were covered with bruises, and whose hearts were heavy, who have not had a night's sleep, and who go all day long without thought of food." Another visitor remarked "there is not a more courageous, sane and reasonable people. Everyone is tender and considerate. Men who have lost wives and children, women whose sons and husbands are dead, boys and girls whose homes have been destroyed, are working to relieve the distress." A Montreal clergyman reported that "Halifax people have been meeting with dry eyes and calm faces the tragedies, the horrors, the sufferings and the exposures which followed the explosion." Grief is after all "a passive emotion," a "reaction of helplessness." It is "a state of mind appropriate to a condition of affairs where nothing is to be done"--[72] and there was much to be done at Halifax. [72] Woodworth, _op. cit._, p. 58. There are also to be added the phenomena of emotional parturition. As was to be expected the shock meant the immediate provision of a maternity hospital. Babies were born in cellars and among ruins. Premature births were common, one indeed taking place in the midst of the huddled thousands of refugees waiting in anguish upon the Common for permission to return to their abandoned homes. Nor were all the ills for which the shock was responsible immediately discernible. There were many post-catastrophic phenomena. Three months after the explosion many found themselves suffering an inexplicable breakdown, which the doctors attributed unquestionably to the catastrophe. It was a condition closely allied to "war-neurasthenia." Another disaster after-effect also may be here recorded. This was the not unnatural way in which people "lived on edge," for a long period after the disaster. There was a readiness and suggestibility to respond to rumor or to the least excitant. Twice at least the schools were emptied precipitately, and citizens went forth into pell-mell flight from their homes upon the circulation of reports of possible danger. No better illustration is afforded of the sociological fact that "the more expectant, or overwrought the public mind, the easier it is to set up a great perturbation. After a series of public calamities .... minds are blown about by every gust of passion or sentiment."[73] [73] Ross, Edward A., _Social Psychology_ (N. Y., 1918), ch. iv, p. 66.