did not
commend himself to their severe judgment of accomplished sailor-men. Said
one, resuming and concluding the discussion in a funnily judicial tone:

"The Board of Trade must have been drunk when they gave him his
certificate."

I confess that this notion of the Board of Trade as an entity having a
brain which could be overcome by the fumes of strong liquor charmed me
exceedingly. For then it would have been unlike the limited companies of
which some exasperated wit has once said that they had no souls to be
saved and no bodies to be kicked, and thus were free in this world and
the next from all the effective sanctions of conscientious conduct. But,
unfortunately, the picturesque pronouncement overheard by me was only a
characteristic sally of an annoyed sailor. The Board of Trade is
composed of bloodless departments. It has no limbs and no physiognomy,
or else at the forthcoming inquiry it might have paid to the victims of
the _Titanic_ disaster the small tribute of a blush. I ask myself
whether the Marine Department of the Board of Trade did really believe,
when they decided to shelve the report on equipment for a time, that a
ship of 45,000 tons, that _any_ ship, could be made practically
indestructible by means of water-tight bulkheads? It seems incredible to
anybody who had ever reflected upon the properties of material, 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