st of the berths were forward, immediately
behind the fo'c'stle, some were right aft; the dining-room was
amidships, and the smoke-room in the extreme stern, over the rudder; and
to enjoy a smoke or game of cards a third-class passenger who was
berthed forward would have to walk the whole length of the ship and back
again, a walk not far short of half a mile. This gives one an idea of
how much more the ship resembled a town than a house. A third-class
passenger did not walk from his bedroom to his parlour; he walked from
the house where he lived in the forward part of the ship to the club a
quarter of a mile away where he was to meet his friends.

If, thinking of the _Titanic_ storming along westward across the
Atlantic, you could imagine her to be split in half from bow to stern so
that you could look, as one looks at the section of a hive, upon all her
manifold life thus suddenly laid bare, you would find in her a microcosm
of civilized society. Up on the top are the rulers, surrounded by the
rich and the luxurious, enjoying the best of everything; a little way
below them their servants and parasites, ministering not so much to
their necessities as to their luxuries; lower down still, at the very
base and foundation of all, the fierce and terrible labour of the
stokeholds, where the black slaves are shovelling and shovelling as
though for dear life, endlessly pouring coal into furnaces that devoured
it and yet ever demanded a new supply--horrible labour, joyless life; and
yet the labour that gives life and movement to the whole ship. Up above
are all the beautiful things, the pleasant things; down below are the
terrible and necessary things. Up above are the people who rest and
enjoy; down below the people who sweat and suffer.

Consider too the whirl of life and multitude of human employments that
you would have found had you peered into this section of the ship that
we are supposing to have been laid bare. Honour and Glory, let us say,
have just crowned ten o'clock in the morning beneath the great dome of
glass and iron that covers the central staircase. Someone has just come
down and posted a notice on the board--a piece of wireless news of
something that happened in London last night. In one of the sunny
bed-rooms (for our section lays everything bare) someone is turning over
in bed again and telling a maid to shut out the sun. Eighty feet below
her the black slaves are working in a fiery pit; ten feet below them