I am not a sentimentalist; therefore it is not a great consolation to me to see all these people breveted as “Heroes” by the penny and halfpenny Press.  It is no consolation at all.  In extremity, in the worst extremity, the majority of people, even of common people, will behave decently.  It’s a fact of which only the journalists don’t seem aware.  Hence their enthusiasm, I suppose.  But I, who am not a sentimentalist, think it would have been finer if the band of the Titanic had been quietly saved, instead of being drowned while playing—­whatever tune they were playing, the poor devils.  I would rather they had been saved to support their families than to see their families supported by the magnificent generosity of the subscribers.  I am not consoled by the false, written-up, Drury Lane aspects of that event, which is neither drama, nor melodrama, nor tragedy, but the exposure of arrogant folly.  There is nothing more heroic in being drowned very much against your will, off a holed, helpless, big tank in which you bought your passage, than in dying of colic caused by the imperfect salmon in the tin you bought from your grocer.

And that’s the truth.  The unsentimental truth stripped of the romantic garment the Press has wrapped around this most unnecessary disaster.

PROTECTION OF OCEAN LINERS {8}—­1914

The loss of the Empress of Ireland awakens feelings somewhat different from those the sinking of the Titanic had called up on two continents.  The grief for the lost and the sympathy for the survivors and the bereaved are the same; but there is not, and there cannot be, the same undercurrent of indignation.  The good ship that is gone (I remember reading of her launch something like eight years ago) had not been ushered in with beat of drum as the chief wonder of the world of waters.  The company who owned her had no agents, authorised or unauthorised, giving boastful interviews about her unsinkability to newspaper reporters ready to swallow any sort of trade statement if only sensational enough for their readers—­readers as ignorant as themselves of the nature of all things outside the commonest experience of the man in the street.

No; there was nothing of that in her case.  The company was content to have as fine, staunch, seaworthy a ship as the technical knowledge of that time could make her.  In fact, she was as safe a ship as nine hundred and ninety-nine ships out of any thousand now afloat upon the sea.  No; whatever sorrow one can feel, one does not feel indignation.  This was not an accident of a very boastful marine transportation; this was a real casualty of the sea.  The indignation of the New South Wales Premier flashed telegraphically to Canada is perfectly uncalled-for.  That statesman, whose sympathy for poor mates and seamen is so suspect to me that I wouldn’t take it at fifty per cent. discount, does not seem to know