'It would be easy for some glib interpreters of Providence to pronounce homilies on the fate of a ship laden with the root of all evil, and of men hasting to be rich; for it is certain that the "Royal Charter" had at least 500,000_l._ on board, and that many of her passengers were returning from Australia with fortunes in their hands. But this catastrophe may point, we think, a safer and more serviceable moral. To mortal sight human destinies are at best a chaos, and it is not for mortal wisdom to presume to fabricate out of inexplicable chances a providential order of its own. Here, for instance, was a ship touching at Queenstown, and landing thirteen passengers, one of whom left his wife on board to pursue her voyage to Liverpool, and, as it turned out, to meet death on the way; here were ten poor riggers, just returned from working a vessel to Cardiff, taken on board from a steam-tug in the Channel, and five of them condemned to perish with a ship that had come all the way from Australia in safety. Who will presume to judge? "The one was taken and the other left." Let us be content to moralize more humbly and humanely on the fate of our fellow-creatures. It were a miserable task, while the bodies of the poor castaway people are still awaiting Christian burial, to look about for whom to blame, when all but a score are beyond the reach of blame or praise. It is easy for us to wonder and regret that the "Royal Charter" should ever have passed on from Queenstown and sailed up the Irish Channel without a pilot in wild and threatening weather--that without a pilot, and with a northerly gale coming on, she should have passed by Holyhead, and kept hugging a dead lee shore at night along the most dangerous line of all our coast. Any one who knows that coast, or who has even glanced at a chart, cannot fail to be struck with consternation at the bare thought of such a ship as the "Royal Charter" keeping that Welsh land close on board in the worst of weather, night coming on, without a pilot, in the hope of finding one, and for the sake of saving a few hours at the close of an astonishingly rapid and successful passage.