Page:Walker - An Unsinkable Titanic (1912).djvu/45

AN UNSINKABLE TITANIC time immemorial, and year by year they will continue to throw the shadow of their awful menace across the lines of steamship travel. Fog, with its ever-present dangers of collision, will continue to infest the ocean highways; and always, the half-submerged derelict, a peril scarcely less than that of the iceberg, will continue to sail its uncharted course over the high seas.

The strength of the impulse to build unsinkable ships will be exactly in proportion to our realisation of the dangers which beset ocean travel. The toll of human life exacted in the recent disaster will lose its one possible compensation, if it fails to impress deeply the very serious lesson that since the sea is not man's natural element, he can hold his way safely across its surface only at the cost of most careful preparation and eternal vigilance.

Protracted and amazing immunity from disasters of portentous magnitude has bred in us something of that very contempt for the dangers of the sea above referred to. We have piled deck upon deck until the "floating palace" of the sea towers twice as far above the water-line as it extends below it. So [ 23 ]