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be nominated to the minister by the naval prefects. The President of the Republic may issue the same reward for good service to any seaman, without reference to length of employment, who has done specially creditable work. What does Great Britain intend to do for her merchant service, and her men of the merchant service? Something must be done in the very near future, if there is any real intention to stop the places of the man before the mast or in the stokehold from being filled entirely by the Lascar, the Chinaman, or other foreigner.
The events of the last twenty or thirty years prove that the working machinery, as it is, does not make for the selection of men of native birth in preference to others. Discipline at sea, governed on shore by people who have not perhaps the first qualification for acting in the matter, beyond being the person to whom it must be submitted, 1s not merely a farce, but really disastrous to the British seagoing community. Whatever attempt at reform is made in the matter of food, wages and accommodation, these must from their very nature remain, a8 they always have been, in the hands of the employers.
Inducement must be made to give shipmasters some real and effective control over the men they engage to work with themselves for a common purpose—the successful prosecution of the work where the ship finds employment. Plenary powers are not merely requested, they are certainly required. The official log-book and the civilian, as an effective institution in the best interests of our seafarers is, we respectfully submit, a disastrous failure.
For a country like Great Britain really is, depending entirely on her merchant ships, it is not too much to expect that special privileges should be extended to the workers in it, considering the exceptional character of their work when compared with other channels of employment on shore, and in which, according to Lord Dudley, the shipping industry comes off very badly.
What is the outlook for the able-bodied seaman or the marine fireman, when he attains the state we must all come to, when he is no longer physically fitted to earn his bread?
This is one of the many things in which we "muddle through somehow," and leave everything to chance. It has been said many a time and oft that a pension scheme for the merchant service is beyond the scope of practical politics.
This statement we are not content to accept, for if it be possible to pension men of the Navy and Army, to say nothing of private concerns and corporations that do it successfully,
