no longer a studied and
valued interest of the ancient corporation. In an assured position as
arbiters between the State and the shipping industry, the Trinity
Brethren could combine a just regard for the merchants' interest with a
generous and understanding appreciation of the seamen's trials and
difficulties. If for no other reason than the record of past endeavours,
they should still control the personnel of the Merchants' Service, in
regulating the scheme of our education, the scope of our qualification
for office, the grades of our service, the essence of our sea-conduct.
But in the fickle doldrums of the period when steam superseded sail as
our motive power, we drifted apart. Shipping interests have become
complicated with land ventures, as widely different from them as the
marine engine is from our former sail plan. In 1850 the Merchants'
Service was placed under control of the Board of Trade; we were handed
over to a Board that is no Board--a department of the State with little,
if any, sea-sentiment, and that is sternly resolved to repress all our
efforts to regain a voice in the control of our own affairs.

THE BOARD OF TRADE

IF we may claim the ancient Corporation of Trinity House as the Alma
Mater of the Merchants' Service, we may liken our comparatively new
directorate, the Board of Trade, to our Alma step-Mater--an austere,
bureaucratic dame, hard-working and earnest, perhaps, but lacking the
kindly spirit of a sea-tradition. She is utterly out of touch and
sympathy with a sea-sense--her arms, overstrained perhaps by the
tremendous burden of charge upon charge that comes to her for
settlement, are never open to the seamen. Sullenly, we resent her
dictation as that of a usurper--a lay impropriator of our professional
heritage. Under her coldly formal direction, we may attend our affairs
in diligence and prudence, but for us there is no motherly licence; she
has no pride in our doings (if one counts not the vicious insistence of
her statistics)--we are only the stepchildren of her adoption, odd men
of the huge and hybrid family over whom she has been set to cast a
suspicious, if guardian, eye. While Trinity House was concerned alone
with the conduct of shipping and sea-affairs, our new controllers of the
Board of Trade have interests in charge as widely apart as the feeding
of draught-horses and the examination of a bankrupt cheesemonger. We are
but a Department. The sea-service of the nation, the key in