631 



The Board of Trade in the Dock 



Mend It or End It — -a Patriotic Duty 



" We shall leave to the honest judgment of England its painstaking chastisement of the Board 

 OF Trade, to whose laxity the world js largely indebted for this awful fatality. . . . The 

 lessons of the hour are, indeed, fruitless and its precepts ill-conceived if rules of action do not follow 

 hard upon the day of reckoning. Obsolete and antiquated shipping laws should no longer encumber the 

 Parliamentary records of any Government, and over-ripe administrative boards should be pruned of dead 

 branches and less sterile precepts taught and applied." — Senator Smith, in the United States Senate. 



THESE are words which come oddly to the cars 

 of a nation which for many decades has con- 

 sidered itself entitled to lead the world in 

 matters maritime, and yet they are uttered 

 in the Senate of the United States by a man who is a 

 member of the Foreign Relations Committee and the 

 Committee of Xaval Affai-'s in America. There has 

 been so much cheap and uncalled-for abuse of Senator 

 Smith in tiie columns of the less responsible news- 

 papers of this country that we feel it our duty to 

 a.ssure Mr. Smith and the Senate of the United States, 

 as well as the American nation generally, that the 

 British public and the officers of the I?ritish mercantile 

 marine are grateful for their remarkable and con- 

 scientious effort to get at the truth of things, and to 

 hasten the day when modern regulations and real 

 supervision shall make ocean travel more humanly 

 safe. Senator Smith, no expert, and arrogating to 

 himself none of the attributes of the expert, felt deeply 

 that the travelling public had been living in a fool's 

 paradise, and determined that the Titanic disaster 

 should not pitss without bringing real reform in its 

 train. 



senator smith on his task. 



" The task," he writes, " was a most necessary 

 and exacting one. requiring immediate action and 

 thorough and painstaking inve-.tigation. With no lime 

 for preparation we entered upon our work, fully detcr- 

 minecl to leave nothing undone which would throw any 

 liL'ht upon the causes leading up to this most unneces- 

 iry tragedy. We felt that it was necessary to obtain 

 I he evidence of the officers and crew, all of whom were 

 British subjects, and that this should be done without 

 flelay, m order that they might not be inconvenienced 

 more than was absolutely neccssarv. Ti> ili o ind «!■ 



laboured unceasingly, and, while it was necessary to 

 insist upon their presence at the hearing, this was done 

 courteously and with every consideration for them and 

 their country, and it was with some satisfaction that I 

 listened to their words of praise for the manner in 

 which they had been treated while here. I am sure that 

 we have overlooked no fact or circumstance necessary 

 to a proper understanding of this matter, and believe 

 much good will be brought about as the result of our 

 efforts," These are not the words of one taking himself 

 or his task lightly — nor does the report of the Senate 

 Commission call for anything save commendation and 

 wonder at its completeness and the valuable recom- 

 " tncndations contained in it, when we remember how 

 rapidly things have moved. 



the committee's conclusions. 

 The conclusions of the committee have been fully 

 dealt with ; but the chief recommendations are those 

 dealing with adequate supervision, boat accommoda- 

 tion, and watertight compartments. " No sufficient 

 tests were made of boilers or bulkheads or gearing or 

 equipment, and no life-saving nor signal devices were 

 reviewed. . . , The supposedly watertight compart- 

 ments of the Titanic were not, in fact, watertight 

 because of the non-watertight condition of the decks 

 where the transverse bulkheads ended," And because 

 of these "watertight compartments and bulkheads" 

 the British Hoard of Trade regulations allow a very 

 great decrease in boat capacity ! 



shall AMERICA LEAD ? 



We have dealt at some length with Senator 

 Smith's attitude in this most vital question to the 

 greatest of maritime countries, not only liecausc he 

 has been grossly misrepresented here, but because his 

 earnestness gives us no ground to think that he will 



