Not the room of three people, I tell you!  But no one would want to pack a boat like a sardine-box.  There must be room enough to handle the oars.  But in that old ship’s boat, even if she had been desperately overcrowded, there was power (manageable by two riverside youngsters) to get away quickly from a ship’s side (very important for your safety and to make room for other boats), the power to keep her easily head to sea, the power to move at five to seven knots towards a rescuing ship, the power to come safely alongside.  And all that in an engine which did not take up the room of three people.

A poor boatman who had to scrape together painfully the few sovereigns of the price had the idea of putting that engine into his boat.  But all these designers, directors, managers, constructors, and others whom we may include in the generic name of Yamsi, never thought of it for the boats of the biggest tank on earth, or rather on sea.  And therefore they assume an air of impatient superiority and make objections—­however sick at heart they may be.  And I hope they are; at least, as much as a grocer who has sold a tin of imperfect salmon which destroyed only half a dozen people.  And you know, the tinning of salmon was “progress” as much at least as the building of the Titanic.  More, in fact.  I am not attacking shipowners.  I care neither more nor less for Lines, Companies, Combines, and generally for Trade arrayed in purple and fine linen than the Trade cares for me.  But I am attacking foolish arrogance, which is fair game; the offensive posture of superiority by which they hide the sense of their guilt, while the echoes of the miserably hypocritical cries along the alley-ways of that ship:  “Any more women?  Any more women?” linger yet in our ears.

I have been expecting from one or the other of them all bearing the generic name of Yamsi, something, a sign of some sort, some sincere utterance, in the course of this Admirable Inquiry, of manly, of genuine compunction.  In vain.  All trade talk.  Not a whisper—­except for the conventional expression of regret at the beginning of the yearly report—­which otherwise is a cheerful document.  Dividends, you know.  The shop is doing well.

And the Admirable Inquiry goes on, punctuated by idiotic laughter, by paid-for cries of indignation from under legal wigs, bringing to light the psychology of various commercial characters too stupid to know that they are giving themselves away—­an admirably laborious inquiry into facts that speak, nay shout, for themselves.

I am not a soft-headed, humanitarian faddist.  I have been ordered in my time to do dangerous work; I have ordered, others to do dangerous work; I have never ordered a man to do any work I was not prepared to do myself.  I attach no exaggerated value to human life.  But I know it has a value for which the most generous contributions to the Mansion House and “Heroes” funds cannot pay.  And they cannot pay for it, because people, even of the third class (excuse my plain speaking), are not cattle.  Death has its sting.  If Yamsi’s manager’s head were forcibly held under the water of his bath for some little time, he would soon discover that it has.  Some people can only learn from that sort of experience which comes home to their own dear selves.