Her loss has created almost a revolution in ocean traffic.  “Let us go more slowly!” was the cry.  Safety became the chief advertisement of the big ship lines; and speed, Speed the adored, shriveled into the dishonored god of a moment’s madness.

The wreck of the steamship Titanic, of the White Star Line, the newest and biggest and presumably the safest ship in the world, is the greatest marine disaster known in the history of ocean traffic.  She ran into an iceberg off the Banks of Newfoundland at 11.40 Sunday night, April 14th, and at twenty minutes past two sank in two miles of ocean depth.  More than fifteen hundred lives were lost and a few more than seven hundred saved.

The Titanic was a marvel of size and luxury.  Her length was 882-1/2 feet—­far exceeding the height of the tallest buildings in the world—­her breadth of beam was 92 feet, and her depth from topmost deck to keel was 94 feet.  She was of 45,000 tons register and 66,000 tons displacement.  Her structure was the last word in size, speed, and luxury at sea.  Her interior was like that of some huge hotel, with wide stairways and heavy balustrades, with elevators running up and down the height of nine decks out of her twelve; with swimming-pools, Turkish baths, saloons, and music-rooms, and a little golf-course on the highest deck.  Her master was Capt.  E. J. Smith, a veteran of more than thirty years’ able and faithful service in the company’s ships, whose only mishap had occurred when the giant Olympic, under his command, collided with the British cruiser Hawke in the Solent last September.  He was exonerated because the great suction exerted by the Olympic in a narrow channel inevitably drew the two vessels together.

There were over 2,200 people aboard the Titanic when she left Southampton on Wednesday for her maiden voyage—­325 first-cabin passengers, 285 second-cabin, 710 steerage, and a crew of 899.  Among that ship’s company were many men and women of prominence in the arts, the professions, and in business.  Colonel John Jacob Astor and his bride, who was Miss Madeleine Force, were among them; also Major Archibald Butt, military aide to President Taft; Charles M. Hays, president of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad, with his family; William T. Stead, of the London Review of Reviews; Benjamin Guggenheim, of the celebrated mining family; G. D. Widener, of Philadelphia; F. D. Millet, the noted artist; Mr. and Mrs. Isidor Straus; J. Thayer, vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad; J. Bruce Ismay, chairman of the White Star Line’s board of directors; Henry B. Harris, theatrical manager; Colonel Washington Roebling, the engineer; Jacques Futrelle, the novelist; and Henry Sleeper Harper, a grandson of Joseph Wesley Harper, one of the founders of the house of Harper & Brothers.