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.

Apparently, there is a point in development when it ceases to be a true
progress--in trade, in games, in the marvellous handiwork of men, and
even in their demands and desires and aspirations of the moral and mental
kind. There is a point when progress, to remain a real advance, must
change slightly the direction of its line. But this is a wide question.
What I wanted to point out here is--that the old _Arizona_, the marvel of
her day, was proportionately stronger, handier, better equipped, than
this triumph of modern naval architecture, the loss of which, in common
parlance, will remain the sensation of this year. The clatter of the
presses has been worthy of the tonnage, of the preliminary paeans of
triumph round that vanished hull, of the reckless statements, and
elaborate descriptions of its ornate splendour. A great babble of news
(and what sort of news too, good heavens!) and eager comment has arisen
around this catastrophe, though it seems to me that a less strident note
would have been more becoming in the presence of so many victims left
struggling on the sea, of lives miserably thrown away for nothing, or
worse than nothing: for false standards of achievement, to satisfy a
vulgar demand of a few moneyed people for a banal hotel luxury--the only
one they can understand--and because the big ship pays, in one way or
another: in money or in advertising value.

It is in more ways than one a very ugly business, and a mere scrape along
the ship's side, so slight that, if reports are to be believed, it did
not interrupt a card party in the gorgeously fitted (but in chaste style)
smoking-room--or was it in the delightful French cafe?--is enough to
bring on the exposure. All the people on board existed under a sense of
false security.