such as wood or steel.  You can’t, let builders say what they like, make a ship of such dimensions as strong proportionately as a much smaller one.  The shocks our old whalers had to stand amongst the heavy floes in Baffin’s Bay were perfectly staggering, notwithstanding the most skilful handling, and yet they lasted for years.  The Titanic, if one may believe the last reports, has only scraped against a piece of ice which, I suspect, was not an enormously bulky and comparatively easily seen berg, but the low edge of a floe—­and sank.  Leisurely enough, God knows—­and here the advantage of bulkheads comes in—­for time is a great friend, a good helper—­though in this lamentable case these bulkheads served only to prolong the agony of the passengers who could not be saved.  But she sank, causing, apart from the sorrow and the pity of the loss of so many lives, a sort of surprised consternation that such a thing should have happened at all.  Why?  You build a 45,000 tons hotel of thin steel plates to secure the patronage of, say, a couple of thousand rich people (for if it had been for the emigrant trade alone, there would have been no such exaggeration of mere size), you decorate it in the style of the Pharaohs or in the Louis Quinze style—­I don’t know which—­and to please the aforesaid fatuous handful of individuals, who have more money than they know what to do with, and to the applause of two continents, you launch that mass with two thousand people on board at twenty-one knots across the sea—­a perfect exhibition of the modern blind trust in mere material and appliances.  And then this happens.  General uproar.  The blind trust in material and appliances has received a terrible shock.  I will say nothing of the credulity which accepts any statement which specialists, technicians and office-people are pleased to make, whether for purposes of gain or glory.  You stand there astonished and hurt in your profoundest sensibilities.  But what else under the circumstances could you expect?

For my part I could much sooner believe in an unsinkable ship of 3,000 tons than in one of 40,000 tons.  It is one of those things that stand to reason.  You can’t increase the thickness of scantling and plates indefinitely.  And the mere weight of this bigness is an added disadvantage.  In reading the reports, the first reflection which occurs to one is that, if that luckless ship had been a couple of hundred feet shorter, she would have probably gone clear of the danger.  But then, perhaps, she could not have had a swimming bath and a French cafe.  That, of course, is a serious consideration.  I am well aware that those responsible for her short and fatal existence ask us in desolate accents to believe that if she had hit end on she would have survived.  Which, by a sort of coy implication, seems to mean that it was all the fault of the officer of the watch (he is dead now) for trying to avoid the obstacle.  We shall have presently, in deference to commercial