Were the Titanic’s equipment and her general state of preparedness such as to justify the broad claims made in her behalf before the crisis arose, that she represented the acme of human possibility not only in ocean going comfort and speed but also in safety at sea? Were the personnel and discipline of her officers and crew of such a standard that, after the supreme crisis confronted them, they utilized to the best advantage such facilities for the safeguarding and preservation of life as remained at their disposal? With ten thousand families on both sides of the Atlantic mourning the untimely death of relatives and friends who went down into the depths from the decks of a brand new ship, widely proclaimed the greatest and the safest that ever ploughed the sea, these are, after all, the most pertinent questions that may be asked by a sorrowing world as it looks to the future rather than the past. LIFE-SAVING APPARATUS INADEQUATE. It has been demonstrated--and frankly conceded by the company’s managers and officers in the light of after knowledge--that the Titanic’s life-saving appliances were woefully inadequate to the safeguarding of even one-half her complement of passengers and crew. On the day after the disaster was known to the world it was shown that the ship’s equipment of lifeboats complied with the requirements of the English Board of Trade, but that those requirements were so obsolete and antiquated that they dated back to 1898 and were drafted to provide for vessels of less than one-quarter the gross tonnage of the mammoth craft of 46,000 tons of displacement. The Titanic carried on her boat deck--sometimes referred to as her sun deck--fourteen of the largest regulation size lifeboats, seven on her port side and seven on the starboard. Each of these had a carrying capacity, according to the Board of Trade’s established method of computation, of 65.5 persons. Their aggregate capacity when afloat, therefore, was 917. The ship carried, in addition, four of the so-called collapsible boats and two others known as emergency boats-comparatively small craft employed in occasional duty--as when a man falls overboard. The combined capacity of these six when afloat was hardly more than sufficient to care for two hundred persons. At the most liberal estimate, therefore, the entire equipment of boats aboard the great White Star liner might have afforded refuge, in the most favorable conditions, to less than 1,200 persons, or not quite half the number actually aboard the ship, on her maiden voyage.