How false, it has been sufficiently demonstrated. And
the fact which seems undoubted, that some of them actually were reluctant
to enter the boats when told to do so, shows the strength of that
falsehood. Incidentally, it shows also the sort of discipline on board
these ships, the sort of hold kept on the passengers in the face of the
unforgiving sea. These people seemed to imagine it an optional matter:
whereas the order to leave the ship should be an order of the sternest
character, to be obeyed unquestioningly and promptly by every one on
board, with men to enforce it at once, and to carry it out methodically
and swiftly. And it is no use to say it cannot be done, for it can. It
has been done. The only requisite is manageableness of the ship herself
and of the numbers she carries on board. That is the great thing which
makes for safety. A commander should be able to hold his ship and
everything on board of her in the hollow of his hand, as it were. But
with the modern foolish trust in material, and with those floating
hotels, this has become impossible. A man may do his best, but he cannot
succeed in a task which from greed, or more likely from sheer stupidity,
has been made too great for anybody's strength.

The readers of _The English Review_, who cast a friendly eye nearly six
years ago on my Reminiscences, and know how much the merchant service,
ships and men, has been to me, will understand my indignation that those
men of whom (speaking in no sentimental phrase, but in the very truth of
feeling) I can't even now think otherwise than as brothers, have been put
by their commercial employers in the impossibility to perform efficiently
their plain duty; and this from motives which I shall not enumerate here,
but whose intrinsic unworthiness is plainly revealed by the greatness,
the miserable greatness, of that disaster. Some of them have perished.
To die for commerce is hard enough, but to go under that sea we have been
trained to combat, with a sense of failure in the supreme duty of one's
calling is indeed a bitter fate. Thus they are gone, and the
responsibility remains with the living who will have no difficulty in
replacing them by others, just as good, at the same wages. It was their
bitter fate. But I, who can look at some arduous years when their duty
was my duty too, and their feelings were my feelings, can remember some
of us who once upon a time were more fortunate.

It is of them that I wo