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that if all the seamen in the mercantile marine were of British nationality they would not constitute a source of supply for the wastage of a naval war to anything like a proportionate extent, as was the case in old days. If, however, it was essential to our national safety that the old proportion be maintained, it was clear that we should have to look elsewhere than to the mercantile marine for our reserves. He did not agree with the noble lord that the employment of foreign. seamen in our mercantile marine necessarily constituted an appreciable danger to those ships, for the foreign seamen in our merchant vessels were drawn from so many different nationalities that, unless we were opposed to an alliance of a most inconceivable kind, it was difficult to understand how sufficient unanimity of purpose would be aroused among the crew to constitute any danger to the vessels. In fact, so little was the employment of foreigners in our mercantile marine regarded as a danger at the beginning of the last century, that in 1808, despite the pressure of the great French War, the Navigation Laws was partially suspended in order to enable three-fourths of the crews of British vessels to be composed of volunteers, instead of one-fourth. As regards the theory that a foreign captain in any English vessel was able to obtain a knowledge of our ports which would enable him to act as pilot to an enemy in case of war, it was, he thought, an extravagant contention. He would point out that the foreign captain would obtain no more information of our ports in an English ship than he did in a ship of some other nation, and come into our ports for the ordinary purposes of trade. Unless, therefore, we decided—^which was of course absurd—to keep all foreign captains outside our ports altogether, it seemed to him to make no difference at all, so far as the obtaining of information went, whether these men commanded our ships or the ships of some other nation. It was undoubtedly true that, in spite of the fact that the mercantile marine employed considerably more seamen than it did thirty years ago, the total number of British seamen was less by about 5,000 than it was at that time; and although he agreed with the noble lord in deploring that fact, he did not think the conclusion which he had based upon it was true, viz., that because there had been a falling-off in British seamen during the last twenty or thirty years we were necessarily losing, as a nation, our sea-going tendency. In order to prove that, it would have to be shown that a much smaller proportion of the population went to sea now than was the case thirty years ago. We owned at the present time 61 per cent, of the gross steam tonnage of the world. In these ships 247,448 seamen were employed, and of these 86,023 were Lascars and 86,898 foreigners, leaving a balance of, in round numbers, 175,000 British seamen. If this figure was applied to a population of forty millions, in estimate in 1898, the result was obtained that 1 in 229 people became merchant seamen. But, as under one-half of our population were males, this gave the figure that 1 in every 112 of the male population became a merchant seaman. In order, however, to form a correct estimate of the sea-going tendency of the nation, the men employed in the Royal Navy must also be taken into consideration.
