early
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.

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 unneces