Now, it is inexpedient to build merchant ships with such an elaborate system of watertight compartments as that described in this chapter. Considerations of cost and convenience of operation render this impossible; but it is entirely possible to incorporate in the large passenger steamers a sufficient degree of protection of this character to render them proof against sinking by the accidents of collision, whether with another ship, a derelict, or even with the dreaded iceberg. The manner in which the problem has been worked out in several of the most noted passenger steamers of the present day is reserved for discussion in the following chapter. [Illustration: This ship has twenty-four compartments below the water line. Fire-bulkheads protect passenger decks. THE 65,000-TON, 23-KNOT IMPERATOR--LARGEST SHIP AFLOAT] CHAPTER IX WARSHIP PROTECTION AS APPLIED TO SOME OCEAN LINERS It was shown in the previous chapter that the most completely protected vessel, so far as its flotation is concerned, is the warship, and plans were given of a battleship whose hull below the water-line was subdivided into no less than five hundred separate watertight compartments. Facts were cited from the naval operations in and around the harbour of Port Arthur, which prove that the battleship is capable of sustaining an enormous amount of injury below the water-line without going to the bottom. Now, if it were possible to apply subdivision to the large ocean liners on the liberal scale on which it is worked out in ships of war, it would not be going too far to say that they would be absolutely unsinkable by any of the usual accidents of collision. The 60,000-ton _Titanic_, were she subdivided as minutely as the warship shown on page 143, would contain at least 1,500 separate compartments below her lower deck, and under these conditions even the long rent which was torn in her plating would have done no more than set her down slightly by the head. Her pumps would have taken care of the leakage of water through the bulkheads, and the ship would have come into New York harbour under her own steam. But a warship and a passenger ship are two very different propositions. The one, being designed to resist the attack of an implacable enemy, who is using every weapon that the ingenuity of man can devise to effect its destruction, is built with little if any regard to the cost. The other, built as a commercial proposition for the purpose of earning reasonable dividends for its owners, and exposed only to such risks of damage as are incidental to ocean transportation, is constructed as economically as reasonable considerations of strength and safety may permit.