I am not saying this by way of disparagement. There is reason in things.
You can't make a 50,000 ton ship as strong as a Huntley and Palmer
biscuit-tin. But there is also reason in the way one accepts facts, and
I refuse to be awed by the size of a tank bigger than any other tank that
ever went afloat to its doom. The people responsible for her, though
disconcerted in their hearts by the exposure of that disaster, are giving
themselves airs of superiority--priests of an Oracle which has failed,
but still must remain the Oracle. The assumption is that they are
ministers of progress. But the mere increase of size is not progress. If
it were, elephantiasis, which causes a man's legs to become as large as
tree-trunks, would be a sort of progress, whereas it is nothing but a
very ugly disease. Yet directly this very disconcerting catastrophe
happened, the servants of the silly Oracle began to cry: "It's no use!
You can't resist progress. The big ship has come to stay." Well, let
her stay on, then, in God's name! But she isn't a servant of progress in
any sense. She is the servant of commercialism. For progress, if
dealing with the problems of a material world, has some sort of moral
aspect--if only, say, that of conquest, which has its distinct value
since man is a conquering animal.
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