because there are nearly two thousand such lights on our
shallow and crooked rivers that we have an interior shipping doing a
carrying trade of millions a year, and giving employment to thousands of
men.

Chief among the sailors' safeguards is the service performed by the United
States revenue cutters. The revenue cutter service, like the lighthouse
system, was established very shortly after the United States became a
nation by the adoption of the Constitution. Its primary purpose, of
course, is to aid in the enforcement of the revenue laws and to suppress
smuggling. The service, therefore, is a branch of the Treasury Department,
and is directly under the charge of the Secretary of the Treasury. In the
course of years, however, the revenue cutter service has extended its
functions. In time of war, the cutters have acted as adjuncts to the navy,
and some of the very best armed service on the high seas has been
performed by them. Piracy in the Gulf of Mexico was largely suppressed by
officers of revenue cutters, and pitched battles have more than once been
fought between small revenue cutters and the pirates of the Louisiana and
the Central American coasts.

But the feature of the service which is of particular pertinence to our
story of American ships and sailors, is the part that it has taken in
aiding vessels that were wrecked, or in danger of being wrecked. Many
years ago, the Secretary of the Treasury directed the officers of the
revenue marine to give all possible aid to vessels in distress wherever
encountered. Perhaps the order was hardly necessary. It is the chiefest
glory of the sailor, whether in the official service, or in the merchant
marine, that he has never permitted a stranger ship to go unaided to
destruction, if by any heroic endeavor he could save either the ship or
her crew. The annals of the sea are full of stories of captains who risked
their own vessels, their own lives, and the lives of their people, in
order to take castaways from wrecked or foundering vessels in a high sea.
But the records of the revenue marine service are peculiarly fruitful of
such incidents, because it was determined some thirty years ago that
cutters should be kept cruising constantly throughout the turbulent winter
seasons for the one sole purpose of rendering aid to vessels in distress.
In these late years, when harbors are thoroughly policed, and when steam
navigation has come to dominate the ocean, there is little use fo