EACH TRAGEDY HAS ITS LESSON
From each appalling tragedy of the sea we laboriously spell out some lessons which are to teach us how to escape these strokes of fate for the future. Then comes another tragedy, and shows us the futility of these dearly-bought lessons. From the Titanic, we deduced that what is needed is a plentiful supply of life-boats and life-rafts. Given enough of these to easily carry all the passengers and crew, and so terrible a disaster as that which engulfed this peerless ship would, we believed, become impossible. Then came the tragedy of the burning Volturno, and practically all those who were “fortunate” enough to get into the life-boats were drowned, and all who stayed with the burning ship were saved.
Thus was the chief lesson drawn from the Titanic shown within a year to be very much less—for all its value—than a certain security against wholesale death at sea. And now we have the frightful case of the Empress of Ireland to emphasize this point. The Empress had life-boats; but so swiftly fell the shattering stroke—they could not be launched. The accident occurred in a quiet river, where, had there been time enough, these life-boats could have saved every man, woman and child on board in the most orderly fashion. In a word, the life-boat “cure” would have been perfect had the conditions of the Titanic disaster obtained.