“The distance was nothing, but the power of the sea and wind made the strife deadly. At length, he neared the wreck. He was so near that with one more of his vigorous strokes he would be clinging to it--when a high, green, vast hill-side of water, moving on, shoreward, from beyond the ship, he seemed to leap up into it with a mighty bound, and the ship was gone! “On running to the spot where they were hauling in, [Illustration: THE LIFE-BOAT.] I saw some eddying fragments in the sea, as if a mere cask had been broken. Consternation was in every face. They drew him to my very feet--insensible--dead--beaten to death by the great wave; and his generous heart was stilled forever.” Such things weighed heavily upon the humanely disposed; and when a century ago Mr. Greathead, who had a great heart, stood at Newcastle-on-Tyne, and saw man after man drop from a great wreck into a raging sea without the possibility of rescue, he set himself to work upon the problem of the life-boat. Noticing that the half of a circular wooden bowl invariably turned concave side upward, when thrown in the water, it occurred to him at once that a boat with a curved instead of straight keel would always right itself. Wouldhave, at the same time was advocating padding the boat heavily with cork: and the first life-boat was constructed from these ideas. A year or two later, a minister in the Orkneys suggested that all boats could be made self-righting by fixing an empty water-tight cask in either end. So the idea of air-chambers developed: and later the curved keel was made of iron, to aid in ballasting the craft: so that the modern life-boat, with curved iron keel, cork padding, air chambers, and tubes to permit water to flow out, cannot be sunk, or made to float bottom up. The men may sometimes be washed out of it, or a side stove in, but the boat will always be found right side up. Strange as it may appear, though the first life-boat, with its crudities, saved hundreds of lives within a few years, the Government took no steps to institute a general system or life-saving service. To the average American, this seems striking; but governments a century ago were more concerned about the success in war than about the welfare of the masses; they studied destruction of life more than its preservation: and if perchance, some ruler affected peculiar concern for the welfare of “the State,” it was generally the case that the definition of Louis XIV was applicable; “The State--that’s _me_!”