The sad international tragedy of the sinking of the Titanic touched men’s souls more deeply than any other disaster in many years.  To English-speaking races in particular the horror of the occasion pressed close home; for here was the best of British ships bearing many of the most prominent of America’s people.  To these seasoned voyagers, crossing the Atlantic had become a mere pleasant trifle, seeming no more dangerous than an afternoon’s shopping in town.  Then suddenly there was thrust upon all of them that ancient, awful knowledge that “in the midst of life we are in death.”

Both American passengers and English crew lived up to the best traditions of their race.  There was no panic, no fighting for places in the boats on the doomed ship.  On the contrary, people refused to believe in the imminence of danger.  The idea that the ship was unsinkable had been so borne in on them that even when summoned upon deck and ordered to put on life-belts, many of them refused.  In the first boats gotten away from the ship, there were not many people.  Some refused to climb down through the deep blackness into the tiny craft.  They thought the tumult all an empty scare that would soon pass.

When the steady, ominous settling of the huge ship’s bulk broke through this shallow confidence, there was a solemn change.  Grand and tender scenes there were on those sinking decks; of husbands and wives parting with the utterance of a hope, turned suddenly to terror, that they would soon meet again; of other wives who refused to leave their husbands and deliberately stayed to share their fate.  Few of the more noted passengers were among those saved.  Bruce Ismay, director of the steamship line, was one.  The captain went down with his ship, as did most of his officers, though some of the latter saved themselves by clinging to the wreckage which rose after the vessel’s plunge.  While she was sinking her band still played “Nearer, my God, to thee,” and other earnest hymns.  Death did not find the old Saxon stock cringing from him with hysteria and frenzy.  Sudden as was his coming, wholly unexpected as was his hideous visage, he was met with the calm courage which is the best tradition of the race.

And what have been the consequences of this overwhelming tragedy?  An investigation was immediately begun in America by the United States Government.  Another, slower, dignified and ponderous, was afterward undertaken by the British Government.  Both of them in the end attributed the disaster to practically the same cause, the speed mania which has overtaken the nations, the heedlessness of man’s over-confidence which takes risks so many times successfully that it grows to forget that risks exist.