Again, as to the great calamities--the earthquakes, shipwrecks, railway accidents, even the wars--which are often made a leading count in the arraignment of the Author of Sentience, we must not let ourselves be deceived by the fallacy of number. Their spectacular, dramatic aspect naturally attracts attention; but the death-roll of a great shipwreck is in fact scarcely more terrible than the daily bills of mortality of a great city. It is true that a violent death, overtaking a healthy man, is apt to involve moments, perhaps hours, of acute distress which he might have escaped had he died of gradual decay or of ordinary well-tended disease; and a very short space of the agony sometimes attendant upon (say) a railway accident, probably represents itself to the sufferer as an eternity. But there is also another side to the matter. Instantaneous death in a great catastrophe must be reckoned as mere euthanasia; and even short of this, the attendant excitement has often the effect of an anodyne. In the upshot, no doubt, such occurrences are rightly called disasters, since their tendency is to cause needlessly painful death, under circumstances, which in the main, enhance its terrors; but the sufferings of the victims cannot be added together because they occur within a limited area, any more than if they had been spread over an indefinite tract of space. As for war, it increases the liability of every individual who comes within its wide-flung net to intense bodily and mental suffering, and to premature and painful death. Moreover, it destroys social values which _can_ be added up. In this respect it leaves the world face to face with an appalling deficit. But we must not let it weigh upon us too heavily, or make it too great a reproach to the Artificer of human destiny. For the soldier, like every other sentient organism, is immured in his own universe, and his individual debit-and-credit account with the Power which placed him there would be no whit different if he were indeed the only real existence, and the world around him were naught but a dance of shadows.