"One Touch of Nature"
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"ONE TOUCH OF NATURE."
One William Shakespeare, a literary man, who is supposed to have understood the intricacies of human nature tolerably well, enunciated an everlasting truth, and threw the material for a volume into a single line, when he wrote—"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin."1
This very sentence cannot but recur to the mind, when we take up the broad pages of the metropolitan sheets and see them filled with the most minute and detailed accounts of the late Great Disaster; when we mark how eagerly these details are seized upon and devoured by millions who are entirely destitute of a selfish and personal interest in the matter, and who are only moved by that mysterious sympathy which is the universal bond of union between all mankind; when we ourselves feel, in common with all around us, a thrill of admiration, a touch of the old "hero-worship," at the bravery and the self-devotion of HERNDON2 and his comrades; a shudder of horror at the death, amid the howling of the storm and blackness of night, of five hundred of our brothers.
The "brotherhood of humanity" is looked upon by some as a fine phrase, signifying but little or nothing. It may seem so, in the jostle and attrition of conflicting elements that make up the life-battle—it may seem that selfishness is the universal rule, and sympathy only the rare exception—but let some great calamity, some overwhelming sorrow, touch the great popular heart with its unutterable pathos, and the phrase will be seen to possess some meaning, after all, despite the sneers of the cynics and the doubters. It will be seen that deep in every man’s better nature beats something responsive to "the still, sad music of humanity,"3 that not all the hardening and corrupting influences that beset us in this Nineteenth Century of the Christian faith can quite extinguish its vitality; that it lives and will live forevermore.
It is strange, how, out of evil, good continually comes. Such great calamities as that which is just now occupying the public mind serve as reminders, as warnings, as lessons. They startle us from our paltry, apathetic selfishness, they elicit feelings better and higher than ordinarily move us, they link us together, for a time at least, by the bond of a mutual sentiment, they teach us that poor, frail human nature can deport itself bravely and well under circumstances the most appalling, they prove to us that the days of heroic self-sacrifice are not yet passed; that in these days, stigmatised as matter-of-fact and materialistic, that spirit still survives, serene, dauntless, undying, only awaiting the hour for its development.