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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 unnecessary disaster.
    PROTECTION OF OCEAN LINERS {8} — 1914
    The loss of the Empress of Ireland awakens feelings somewhat different from those the sinking of the Titanic had called up on two continents.  The grief for the lost and the sympathy for the survivors and the bereaved are the same; but there is not, and there cannot be, the same undercurrent of indignation.  The good ship that is gone (I remember reading of her launch something like eight years ago) had not been ushered in with beat of drum as the chief wonder of the world of waters.  The company who owned her had no agents, authorised or unauthorised, giving boastful interviews about her unsinkability to newspaper reporters ready to swallow any sort of trade statement if only sensational enough for their readers — readers as ignorant as themselves of the nature of all things outside the commonest experience of the man in the street.
    No; there was nothing of that in her case.  The company was content to have as fine, staunch, seaworthy a ship as the technical knowledge of that time could make her.  In fact, she was as safe a ship as nine hundred and ninety-nine ships out of any thousand now afloat upon the sea.  No; whatever sorrow one can feel, one does not feel indignation.  This was not an accident of a very boastful marine transportation; this was a real casualty of the sea.  The indignation of the New South Wales Premier flashed telegraphically to Canada is perfectly uncalled-for.  That statesman, whose sympathy for poor mates and seamen is so suspect to me that I wouldn’t take it at fifty per cent. discount, does not seem to know that a British Court of Marine Inquiry, ordinary or extraordinary, is not a contrivance for catching scapegoats.  I, who have been seaman, mate and master for twenty years, holding my certificate under the Board of Trade, may safely say that none of us ever felt in danger of unfair treatment from a Court of Inquiry.  It is a perfectly impartial tribunal which has never punished seamen for the faults of shipowners — as, indeed, it could not do even if it wanted to.  And there is another thing the angry Premier of New South Wales does not know.  It is this: that for a ship to float for fifteen minutes after receiving such a blow by a bare stem on her bare side is not so bad.
    She took a tremendous list which made the minutes of grace vouchsafed her of not much use for the saving of lives.  But for that neither her owners nor her officers are responsible.  It would have been wonderful if she had not listed with such a hole in her side.  Even the Aquitania with such an opening in her outer hull would be bound to take a list.  I don’t say this with the intention of disparaging this latest “triumph of marine architecture” — to use the consecrated phrase.  The Aquitania is a magnificent ship.  I believe she would bear her people unscathed through ninety-nine per cent. of all possible accidents of the