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low freights is always reduced according to the number of apprentices they carry, a master of a ship cannot afford to have other boys on board. In consequence there is no opportunity for a poor boy who would eventually make a good seaman to go to sea to learn the profession, and as Board of Trade examinations for masters and mates have hitherto been pretty easy, this will also account for such an enormous number of officers as exist at the present time. Thus it often happens that the British A.B. of to-day has not had an opportunity of being trained to his business, but has slipped into the merchant service as fireman, stoker, or something of the kind, at an age when he is no longer a boy, and he is shipped on board the first ship 'hard-up' for a crew by his boarding master as a full fledged A.B. To avoid trouble with the crew many shipmasters are obliged to put up with such men, and do not care to disrate them, as when this class of A.B. is in the majority on board, which is nearly always the case, it would take a pretty powerful afterguard to keep them in place or get any good out of them.
"Furthermore, the state of things as regards the shipping of crews in such foreign ports as San Francisco and New York must receive part of the blame where a shipmaster is obliged to take what is given him as A.B.'s, from the absconding thief to the cut-throat assassin.
"Foreigners would not impede the rising generation of seamen if the rising generation could only get into the service in the proper way to learn their profession, since a boy knows very little of the existence of foreigners in connection with sea life. It is the absence of the firstclass A.B. of twenty years ago for which the influx of foreigners is mainly responsible; and, as I have already stated, he is in existence, though I do not think it possible to tempt him back in many cases. There is not 1 per cent. of the stevedores' men in the seaports of Australia and New Zealand who are not British seamen. I believe the Colonies hold thousands of British seamen to-day, and it is not an uncommon thing for batches of them to come down from the country and endeavour to get a berth as A.B. in a ship going to England for the purpose of going home to see their friends. Stevedores' men in Australia often go home in this way, and I have found them from experience to be better sailors than I usually get. The masters of any Colonial trading ships will bear me out in this. Furthermore, there, ~ is not a schooner on the north-west shores of America one-third of whose crew, though naturalised Americans now, were not originally British seamen, and I believe thousands of British seamen are sailing in American ships of some sort. The American lakes, I know, at one time used to be a great attraction to our seamen. The American himself does not take to the sea, and that is why American ships are mostly manned by foreigners. They become naturalised in some instances, but that does not alter their original nationality.
"It may be said that much of this has nothing to do with the vital question of manning the Navy; but as Lord Charles Beresford pointed out in Liverpool, we are in great danger by carrying the foreigner in our merchant ships. 'I am afraid that if we were to put ourselves in
