A great babble of news
(and what sort of news too, good heavens!) and eager comment has arisen
around this catastrophe, though it seems to me that a less strident note
would have been more becoming in the presence of so many victims left
struggling on the sea, of lives miserably thrown away for nothing, or
worse than nothing: for false standards of achievement, to satisfy a
vulgar demand of a few moneyed people for a banal hotel luxury--the only
one they can understand--and because the big ship pays, in one way or
another: in money or in advertising value.
It is in more ways than one a very ugly business, and a mere scrape along
the ship's side, so slight that, if reports are to be believed, it did
not interrupt a card party in the gorgeously fitted (but in chaste style)
smoking-room--or was it in the delightful French cafe?--is enough to
bring on the exposure. All the people on board existed under a sense of
false security. How false, it has been sufficiently demonstrated. And
the fact which seems undoubted, that some of them actually were reluctant
to enter the boats when told to do so, shows the strength of that
falsehood.
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