It is a heart-rending story, redeemed and ennobled by the heroism of the victims. Its details are appalling. The world is full of mournings for the dead. Nature has conquered again, destroying with ruthless hand the most marvelous ship that ever floated on the bosom of the deep.
It is the worst disaster that ever befell any vessel. It is the wrecking of a whole armada within one hull of steel, vaunted as unsinkable.
The sinking of the “Titanic” is an appalling catastrophe, in the contemplation of which any words that can be uttered are as futile as in the presence of the awful majesty of the Angel of Death.
The maiden trip of the newest, staunchest and greatest of the modern ocean greyhounds has thus apparently ended in the most appalling marine disaster ever recorded.
The first advices brought word of the safe removal of all the passengers and the possible success of the crew in their endeavor to bring the noblest ship afloat to shallow water. Another triumph of the wireless telegraph was hailed, and from both shores went up a paean of thanksgiving that the overwhelming loss was not of life but of things material, that, however valuable, are far less dear and can one day be replaced.
But now as a bolt from the blue, and as a forecast of the final mortal terrors of the Day of Judgment, comes the message that of 2300 souls aboard, but 700—chiefly women and children—have been saved.
All earthly concerns beside this calamity seem to fade into littleness and nothingness. The sole redeeming circumstance is that heroes met their death like men, and that human love was victorious over human terror, and mightier than Death and the open grave of the remorseless deep.
The one alleviating circumstance in this terrible tragedy is the fact that the men stood aside and insisted that the women and children should first have places in the boats.
There were men who were accustomed merely to pronounce a wish to have it gratified. For one of the humblest fishing smacks or a dory they could have given the price that was paid to build the immense ship that has become the most imposing mausoleum that ever housed the bones of men since the Pyramids rose from the desert sands.
But these men stood aside—one can see them—and gave place not merely to the delicate and the refined, but to the scared woman from the steerage with her toddler by her side, coming through the very gate of Death and out of the mouth of Hell to the imagined Eden of America.