You can't, let builders say what they like, make a ship
of such dimensions as strong proportionately as a much smaller one. The
shocks our old whalers had to stand amongst the heavy floes in Baffin's
Bay were perfectly staggering, notwithstanding the most skilful handling,
and yet they lasted for years. The _Titanic_, if one may believe the
last reports, has only scraped against a piece of ice which, I suspect,
was not an enormously bulky and comparatively easily seen berg, but the
low edge of a floe--and sank. Leisurely enough, God knows--and here the
advantage of bulkheads comes in--for time is a great friend, a good
helper--though in this lamentable case these bulkheads served only to
prolong the agony of the passengers who could not be saved. But she
sank, causing, apart from the sorrow and the pity of the loss of so many
lives, a sort of surprised consternation that such a thing should have
happened at all. Why? You build a 45,000 tons hotel of thin steel
plates to secure the patronage of, say, a couple of thousand rich people
(for if it had been for the emigrant trade alone, there would have been
no such exaggeration of mere size), you decorate it in the style of the
Pharaohs or in the Louis Quinze style--I don't know which--and to please
the aforesaid fatuous handful of individuals, who have more money than
they know what to do with, and to the applause of two continents, you
launch that mass with two thousand people on board at twenty-one knots
across the sea--a perfect exhibition of the modern blind trust in mere
material and appliances.
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