Some of them have perished.
To die for commerce is hard enough, but to go under that sea we have been
trained to combat, with a sense of failure in the supreme duty of one's
calling is indeed a bitter fate. Thus they are gone, and the
responsibility remains with the living who will have no difficulty in
replacing them by others, just as good, at the same wages. It was their
bitter fate. But I, who can look at some arduous years when their duty
was my duty too, and their feelings were my feelings, can remember some
of us who once upon a time were more fortunate.
It is of them that I would talk a little, for my own comfort partly, and
also because I am sticking all the time to my subject to illustrate my
point, the point of manageableness which I have raised just now. Since
the memory of the lucky _Arizona_ has been evoked by others than myself,
and made use of by me for my own purpose, let me call up the ghost of
another ship of that distant day whose less lucky destiny inculcates
another lesson making for my argument. The _Douro_, a ship belonging to
the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, was rather less than one-tenth the
measurement of the _Titanic_.
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