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shipping in the oversea trade would shortly be manned mainly by foreigners, not always, perhaps, under the command of British officers. Training was the initial step in any remedial scheme. All the recommendations of the Manning Committee had been adopted except those relating to school ships, and as it was no longer possible to maintain the Reserves at the strength voted by Parliament he urged that State aid was necessary to maintain the supply of seamen. He made various suggestions as to how this might be done, and urged that the matter should be taken in hand by the Reserve Office and the Board of Trade.
"The Earl of Dudley, speaking on behalf of the Board of Trade, discussed the subject with reference to the mercantile marine, which could not, he admitted, be maintained as a reserve for the Navy in anything like the same proportion as in the days gone by. Until advantages as great as those of ordinary shore employment were offered to the working classes, he did not think that the proportion of men going to sea would be increased. As to school ships, those that existed were not fully used, and he thought it would be well to await the result of an experiment now being made by the Shipping Federation, which embraced four-fifths of the total shipping of the United Kingdom, and which had called upon all the shipowners within its body to carry at least two boys on all ships of a certain size. It was much more in the direction of private effort than by artificial means that the solution of this problem was likely to be found. Lord Goschen associated himself with what had fallen from Lord Brassey, and dwelt upon the increasing necessity of giving attention to the Reserves. The Earl of Selborne replied at great length. No effort, he said, would be^spared to increase and improve the Reserves. He quoted excellent results from the Royal Naval Reserve among Newfoundland fishermen, and mentioned that the Naval Artillery Volunteer Corps, which had been disbanded, was being revived as Naval Volunteers, which it was desired to add to the reserve forces of the Navy. It was too soon, however, to make any pronouncement on the subject. As to the manning of the mercantile marine, he could not add anything to what had been said by Lord Dudley. He stated that the Admiralty had not the ships or the money to train seamen, but it was the intention to increase the Cruiser Squadron, 80 that it might do the work of a Training Squadron. The School of Naval Strategy at Greenwich had been a great success, and he hoped it would be the beginning of huge developments. He then proceeded to defend his ship-building policy, which was not a policy of building upon a programme spread over years, but of steady, persistent and continuous ship-building from year to year. The Earl of Dudley, speaking on behalf of the Board of Trade, said it was obviously impossible to maintain at the present time the mercantile marine as a reserve for the Navy in anything like the same proportion as in days gone by. At the present time there were 247,000 sailors in the mercantile marine, as compared with 119,000 in the Navy. Thirty years ago there were 197,000 in the mercantile marine, as compared with 48,000 in the Navy, so that it was obvious
