I assure you it is not for the vain pleasure of talking about my own poor experiences, but only to illustrate my point, that I will relate here a very unsensational little incident I witnessed now rather more than twenty years ago in Sydney, N.S.W.  Ships were beginning then to grow bigger year after year, though, of course, the present dimensions were not even dreamt of.  I was standing on the Circular Quay with a Sydney pilot watching a big mail steamship of one of our best-known companies being brought alongside.  We admired her lines, her noble appearance, and were impressed by her size as well, though her length, I imagine, was hardly half that of the Titanic.

She came into the Cove (as that part of the harbour is called), of course very slowly, and at some hundred feet or so short of the quay she lost her way.  That quay was then a wooden one, a fine structure of mighty piles and stringers bearing a roadway—­a thing of great strength.  The ship, as I have said before, stopped moving when some hundred feet from it.  Then her engines were rung on slow ahead, and immediately rung off again.  The propeller made just about five turns, I should say.  She began to move, stealing on, so to speak, without a ripple; coming alongside with the utmost gentleness.  I went on looking her over, very much interested, but the man with me, the pilot, muttered under his breath:  “Too much, too much.”  His exercised judgment had warned him of what I did not even suspect.  But I believe that neither of us was exactly prepared for what happened.  There was a faint concussion of the ground under our feet, a groaning of piles, a snapping of great iron bolts, and with a sound of ripping and splintering, as when a tree is blown down by the wind, a great strong piece of wood, a baulk of squared timber, was displaced several feet as if by enchantment.  I looked at my companion in amazement.  “I could not have believed it,” I declared.  “No,” he said.  “You would not have thought she would have cracked an egg—­eh?”

I certainly wouldn’t have thought that.  He shook his head, and added:  “Ah!  These great, big things, they want some handling.”

Some months afterwards I was back in Sydney.  The same pilot brought me in from sea.  And I found the same steamship, or else another as like her as two peas, lying at anchor not far from us.  The pilot told me she had arrived the day before, and that he was to take her alongside to-morrow.  I reminded him jocularly of the damage to the quay.  “Oh!” he said, “we are not allowed now to bring them in under their own steam.  We are using tugs.”

A very wise regulation.  And this is my point—­that size is to a certain extent an element of weakness.  The bigger the ship, the more delicately she must be handled.  Here is a contact which, in the pilot’s own words, you wouldn’t think could have cracked an egg; with the astonishing result of something like eighty feet of good strong wooden quay shaken loose, iron bolts snapped, a baulk of stout timber splintered.  Now, suppose that quay had been of granite (as surely it is now)—­or, instead of the quay, if there had been, say, a North Atlantic fog there, with a full-grown iceberg in it awaiting the gentle contact of a ship groping its way along blindfold?  Something would have been hurt, but it would not have been the iceberg.