50 Years Ago: The SS Titanic
The ship was built to carry rich passengers across the herring-pond. Almost the first comment that was made by the newspapers when the fatal news came to hand was that among the first-class passengers aboard the vessel were millionaires who were collectively worth £30,000,000. This in itself is significant. The fares of those six hundred first and second class passengers must have totalled an enormous sum, compared with which the passage money of the steerage was a negligible quantity. The Titanic, then, was essentially built for rich passengers, upon whom the White Star Company depended to enable their vessel to “earn” a dividend. The course is clear from this. The ship was on her maiden voyage; it was necessary to convince the wealthy, whose time is so extremely valuable, that she was a fast boat. So, as it is admitted, there was a general order to “smash all records” —which was duly done.
This explains why the look-out men had glasses until they reached Queenstown, but not afterwards— record smashing on the Western voyage commences at Queenstown.
So at the bottom it is the greed for profit and the insatiable desire tor speed on the part of the rich that is responsible for the disaster, whatever conclusion the Committee of Enquiry may come to.
Of the first-class men 34 per cent were saved; of the steerage men only 12 per cent. Figures like these are eloquent enough without the evidence of the officer who admitted that he kept steerage passengers from a half-filled boat with shots from his revolver. … Of first-class women and children practically all were saved, some even with their pet dogs. Of the steerage women and children more than half perished. The “chivalry” of the ruling class does not, save in very rare instances, extend itself to the class beneath them.
(From the SOCIALIST STANDARD May 1912.)