used to tell a story much in point. The late Lord Ellenborough interested himself in the safety and welfare of seamen, and prepared a Bill by which it was proposed that every merchant ship should be subjected to official survey on each occasion of her leaving port. Having confidence in Commander Brown's judgment and experience, he sent the Bill to that officer and begged him to call. When they met, Lord Ellenborough said, "Well, what do you think of my Bill?" Commander Brown replied: "Does your Lordship know the number of ships which leave London daily?" mentioning a number which, though large, no doubt fell far short of the present number. Lord Ellenborough said not a word, but tore his Bill in two and flung the fragments into the waste paper basket.

Let us, for example, take one point on which special stress has recently been laid, viz., stability or stiffness, or, to use a landsman's phrase, the power of a ship to keep or return to an upright position and to resist tendencies to capsize. To ascertain this accurately we are told by high authority that it is necessary to calculate curves of stability, showing what the ship will do under all the various conditions in which the weight of her cargo may be varied or disposed, and by which she may be made to heel over to one side or the other. To make such calculations complete is a serious business, and takes weeks, if not months, of labour. And when the curve is got out its application must be understood, and as its practical application varies with every different disposition of the weights on board a ship, it must be used and applied locally and intelligently on each separate occasion of the ship leaving port. Supposing this to be necessary, then the staff of the Board of Trade must be prepared to see that it is done, and done properly; and not only so, but they must have at every port a man or men able and ready to use and apply these curves of stability on every occasion of the ship's loading, and it will be the duty of these officers to see that the masters or owners do so apply them. How many officers of first-rate ability and acquirements will be wanted for this purpose alone? And if all the different requirements of a ship, with the ever-growing applications of science to them all, are to be treated in the same way it is

somewhat alarming to think what the staff of the Board of Trade will be. The Department will have created for itself not one but hundreds of Frankensteins in the shape of scientific surveyors: the civil officers will be helpless, and the President himself, already overburdened with technical details, will be a helpless puppet in the hands of his so-called advisers. The expense, already no trifle, will be a heavy burden. The responsibility of the private shipbuilder and shipowner, already, as we shall see, far less than it ought to be, will not only disappear, but will be extinguished without hope of resuscitation. And all for what purpose? In order to swaddle the energy of our mechanics and our sailors in an official strait jacket,-in order to see that the shipbuilder, the shipowner, the shipmaster take no step without the guiding and supporting hand of an official nursemaid. It is not under such a system that Englishmen have become the carriers of the world; it is not by such a system that we have achieved that predominance at sea which is the envy of other nations. But it may well happen, should such a system be adopted, that our energies may be paralysed and that we may lose the conquests which our free energy have won for us.

It is no doubt a beautiful picture,-that of a Government Department with a staff of the ablest naval architects, engineers, ships' husbands, sailors, and stevedores, with an all wise minister ever at their head, and an army of skilled and intelligent hands at every port, guiding, warning, managing, the British Mercantile Marine; taking counsel with the wise; giving counsel to the foolish; checking the forward; hurrying on the backward; rewarding the earnest and the prudent; and preventing and controlling the dishonest and the reckless. But alas! it is a dream; it is not English, and it is not practicable.

But even this is not all. Not only must we, as already pointed out, have at head-quarters men possessing a perfect knowledge of the principles of naval architecture, of engineering, of seamanship; not only must we have at every port in the kingdom men capable of applying these principles at once to every ship that enters or leaves the port; not only must we have enough of such men to be present whilst every ship is being built, repaired, and loaded; not

only must we decuple our present staff; not only must we spend upon it £500,000 or more instead of £50,000, as at present; we must do much more. Some of the worst evils arise in foreign ports. All our corn and all our timber is laden abroad. We must have, therefore, a large staff of able surveyors at all the ports at which our ships load in the United States, in Russia, and elsewhere. Who is to pay for this? and who is to be responsible for such an army of officials? The Board of Trade have already tried the system of foreign surveys in the case of grain ships, and have, it would seem, been compelled to abandon it.

But suppose those difficulties got over, and suppose an efficient staff established at home and abroad, what shall we have done? We shall have taken the business of shipbuilding and shipowning out of private hands, and have made it a business of the State, and this under the most unfavourable conditions. It will surely cease to flourish, if not to exist, and we shall have saved the seamen whom we wished to protect at the expense of their means of existence.

"You do take my life, When you do take the means by which I live."

(To be continued.)

THE

NAUTICAL MAGAZINE

FIFTY-THIRD YEAR.

VOLUME LIII.-No. II.

FEBRUARY, 1884.

MR. CHAMBERLAIN AND THE SHIPOWNERS.

T is difficult to understand why the shipowners should be opposed to Mr. Chamberlain's views in connection with Merchant Shipping. So far as we have been

able to judge from the substance of the memorandum issued by his authority, and the substance of the replies which have been published, it would appear either that the intentions of Mr. Chamberlain are wholly or partially misunderstood by the shipowners, or that the shipowners are of opinion that no evil exists which calls for a remedy at the hands of the Legislature.

Put into a very simple form, some thousands of seamen's lives are lost every year, and a great part of this loss is regarded by Mr. Chamberlain as an evil demanding legislation. It is idle for shipowners, or for anyone to squabble over exact figures. Sometimes the number of hands lost to those employed is 1 in 60, sometimes 1 in 100. Sometimes the actual number of lives lost in the year is over, sometimes under, 3,000. Mr. Chamberlain

* Memorandum published in the Times, and reprinted. London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., J. D. Potter and Co., and Pewtress and Co. Price 6d.

VOL. LIII.

F

says he has reason to believe that a serious part of this loss of life is preventable, and this being so, he feels it to be his duty to make an effort (on new lines, if the old ones will not do) to stop so much of it as is preventable.

It is idle for the shipowners to oppose this view, and it is still more idle of them to base their opposition to remedial legislation, on the very flimsy ground that Mr. Chamberlain may have said that 1 in 60 seamen lose their lives when he ought to have said 1 in 70.*

We believe Mr. Chamberlain's figures are absolutely correct in the sense he used them; but were they incorrect to the very

small extent that even his most serious and well-informed critic has been able to discover, the case is not altered one jot or tittle. The fact remains that loss of life is too great. As some steps must be attempted to reduce this loss, is it not better that those steps should be taken before another 3,000, 6,000, 9,000 or 12,000 of our seamen are drowned, and before another Plimsoll arises ? and will it be wise for the shipowners to deny to Mr. Chamberlain that co-operation which he has asked for and deserves?

It will, no doubt, be a matter of supreme indifference in the end, whether the shipowners do or do not co-operate. We mean that their withholding from participation in the matter of reform in shipping legislation will not be likely to stand in the way of reform ; whilst their co-operation might shape legislation in a way they might desire but whether they co-operate or whether they stand by, or whether they oppose, the hand of the reformer is upon them, and the legislature may possibly once more interfere in the interests of the safety of the working classes; and once more interfere with the freedom of contract.

If the shipowners maintain a hostile attitude, and if in so doing they get the feeling of the country against them, as they did during the Pimsoll agitation, will they not have themselves, and themselves only, to blame for the consequences?

In our own pages, as long ago as 1872, we pointed out that "insurance" is at the bottom of a very great deal of the evil, and

* See Notes on Mr. Chamberlain's speech, p. 260, of our Volume for the year 1883.