art of the whole. Thus, instead of insuring a
million with a company or a single man, the owner lays his case before
Lloyd's, whereupon any members who choose to do so can sign for
whatever proportion they intend to assume. In this way individual
losses are spread among a considerable number of underwriters. Long
{175} experience has proved that the individual and associated methods
of doing business have nowhere been more happily combined than they are
at Lloyd's to-day, and that this special form of combination suits both
parties in a shipping risk better than any other known.

Canadian shipping has often resented Lloyd's high rates against the St
Lawrence route, and threatened to establish a Lloyd's of its own. Yet,
on the whole, the original Lloyd's is the fairest, the soundest, and
incomparably the most expert association of its kind the world has ever
seen.

Business administration in marine affairs is complex enough. Lloyd's
alone is not the subject of one text-book, nor of several, but of a
regular and constantly increasing library. What, then, can usefully be
said in a very few words about the still more complex affairs of
government administration? The bare enumeration of the duties
performed by a single branch of the department of Marine and Fisheries
in Canada will give some faint idea of what the whole department does.
There are Naval, Fisheries, and Marine branches, each with sub-branches
of its own. Among the duties of the Marine branch are the following:
the construction of lighthouses and fog-alarms, {176} the maintenance
of lights and buoys, the building and maintenance of Dominion steamers,
the consideration of all aids to navigation, the maintenance of the St
Lawrence ship channel, the weather reports and forecasts,
investigations into wrecks, steamboat inspection, cattle-ship
inspection, marine hospitals, submarine signals, the carrying out of
the Merchant Shipping Act and other laws, humane service, subsidies to
wrecking plant, winter navigation, removal of obstructions,
examinations for masters' and mates' certificates, control of pilots,
government of ports and harbours, navigation of Hudson Bay and northern
waters generally, port wardens, wreck receivers, and harbour
commissioners.

Besides all this there are, in the work of the department, items like
the Dominion registry of more than eight thousand vessels, the
administration of the enormous fisheries, and the hydrographic survey.