report, and with a dreary murmur, “Unsinkable,” put it back again, in the hope of not being disturbed for another ten years, with what face it will be putting questions to that man who has done his duty, as to the facts of this disaster and as to his professional conduct in it—­well, I don’t know!  I have the greatest respect for our established authorities.  I am a disciplined man, and I have a natural indulgence for the weaknesses of human institutions; but I will own that at times I have regretted their—­how shall I say it?—­their imponderability.  A Board of Trade—­what is it?  A Board of . . .  I believe the Speaker of the Irish Parliament is one of the members of it.  A ghost.  Less than that; as yet a mere memory.  An office with adequate and no doubt comfortable furniture and a lot of perfectly irresponsible gentlemen who exist packed in its equable atmosphere softly, as if in a lot of cotton-wool, and with no care in the world; for there can be no care without personal responsibility—­such, for instance, as the seamen have—­those seamen from whose mouths this irresponsible institution can take away the bread—­as a disciplinary measure.  Yes—­it’s all that.  And what more?  The name of a politician—­a party man!  Less than nothing; a mere void without as much as a shadow of responsibility cast into it from that light in which move the masses of men who work, who deal in things and face the realities—­not the words—­of this life.

Years ago I remember overhearing two genuine shellbacks of the old type commenting on a ship’s officer, who, if not exactly incompetent, did not commend himself to their severe judgment of accomplished sailor-men.  Said one, resuming and concluding the discussion in a funnily judicial tone: 

“The Board of Trade must have been drunk when they gave him his certificate.”

I confess that this notion of the Board of Trade as an entity having a brain which could be overcome by the fumes of strong liquor charmed me exceedingly.  For then it would have been unlike the limited companies of which some exasperated wit has once said that they had no souls to be saved and no bodies to be kicked, and thus were free in this world and the next from all the effective sanctions of conscientious conduct.  But, unfortunately, the picturesque pronouncement overheard by me was only a characteristic sally of an annoyed sailor.  The Board of Trade is composed of bloodless departments.  It has no limbs and no physiognomy, or else at the forthcoming inquiry it might have paid to the victims of the Titanic disaster the small tribute of a blush.  I ask myself whether the Marine Department of the Board of Trade did really believe, when they decided to shelve the report on equipment for a time, that a ship of 45,000 tons, that any ship, could be made practically indestructible by means of water-tight bulkheads?  It seems incredible to anybody who had ever reflected upon the properties of material,