There was a collision bulkhead to safeguard the ship against the invasion of water amidships should the bow be torn away. In a word, the boat was as safe and sound as the shipbuilder could make it.
It was the pride of the owners and the commander that what has happened could not possibly occur. And yet the Titanic went down, and carried to their doom hundreds of passengers and men who intimately knew the sea and had faced every peril that the navigator meets.
In the hours between half-past 10 on Sunday night and half-past 2 Monday morning, while the ship still floated, what did the luxuries of their $10,000,000 castle on the ocean avail those who trod the eight steel decks, not knowing at what moment the whole glittering fabric might plunge with them—as it did plunge—to the unplumbed abyss below?
What was it, in those agonizing hours, to the men who remained aboard, or to the women and children placed in the boats, that there were three electric elevators, squash courts and Turkish baths, a hospital with an operating room, private promenade decks and Renaissance cabins? What is it to a man about to die to know that there is at hand a palm garden or a darkroom for photography, or the tapestry of an English castle or a dinner service of 10,000 pieces of silver and gold?
In that midnight crisis the one thing needful was not provided, where everything was supplied. The one inadequacy was—the lack of lifeboats.
In the supreme confidence of the tacit assumption that they never would be needed, the means of rescue—except in a pitiably meagre insufficiency—was not at hand. There were apparently but 20 boats and rafts available, each capable of sustaining at most 60 persons.
Yet the ship was built to carry 2435 passengers and 860 in the crew—a total of 3295 persons.
Whatever the luxuriousness of the appointments, the magnificence of the carvings and the paintings that surfeited the eye, the amplitude of the space allotted for the promenade, it seems incredible no calculation was made for the rescue of at least 2000 of the possible floating population of the Titanic.
The result of the tragedy must be that aroused public opinion will compel the formulation of new and drastic regulations, alike by the British Board of Trade and by the Federal authorities, providing not merely for the adequate equipment of every ship with salvatory apparatus but for rigorous periodical inspection of the appliances and a constant drill of the crew.
Let there be an end of boasting about the supremacy of man to the immitigable laws and forces of nature. Let the grief of mankind be assuaged not in idle lamentation but in amelioration of the conditions that brought about the saddest episode in the history of ships at sea.