aboard if they try to escape.  Every other person in every other kind of employment, since the abolition of slavery, signing similar papers has a right to refuse to carry out his agreement, with no other penalty than a suit for damages.  He cannot be forced to carry out the contract in person.  If this were not so, there would be a sort of contract peonage or slavery endorsed by the law.  It is otherwise, however, with the sailors.  The United States Supreme Court in the case of Robertson v.  Baldwin (165 U.S. 275, 1896) decided, Judge Harlan dissenting, that notwithstanding the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution which, it was supposed, had prohibited involuntary servitude except as punishment for crime, sailors could be forced on board of vessels, and the facts that the vessel was unfit for living, the food bad, and the master brutal were no defences.  The headnote of the case says, ``The contract of a sailor has always been treated as an exceptional one involving to a certain extent the surrender of his personal liberty during the life of his contract.’’ Mr. Plimsoll was rightly convinced that unseaworthy vessels left port for the sake of insurance money on valued policies, that the lives of the seamen were thereby imperilled, and that the poor sailor had no redress before the law.  The bill that had just been thrown out by Disraeli provided that if one-quarter of the seamen appealed on the ground of unseaworthiness a survey would be ordered, the vessel detained till the survey was made, and if she were unseaworthy or improperly provisioned the sailors would be relieved from their contract unless those defects were cured.  It also had other minor provisions for the benefit of the sailors.  In Parliament that night, it was thought that Plimsoll’s wild conduct had destroyed his reputation as a sane man and had ruined the chances of ever passing his bill, but outside of Parliament the effect was just the reverse.  The public was aroused to a full understanding of the essential merits of his bill and the government was forced to put it on the calendar and carry it through that session in its substantial features, and the following year (1876) a more complete and perfected act covering the same points was passed.

In the United States, a most interesting character, Andrew Furuseth, a Norwegian, himself a sailor, and without much education but a man of wonderful force, has succeeded, largely by the aid of labor unions, in forcing through Congress bills by which no American seaman can any longer be forced against his will into this servitude nor any foreign seaman on domestic voyages.  Another evil tending to degrade and enslave the sailor was the allowance made by law of three months’ advance wages on beginning a voyage.  This apparently harmless and, to the credulous and inexperienced legislator, beneficial provision gave a chance to the sailors’ boarding-house keeper and runner, or ``crimp,’’ as he or she is called, to ``shanghai’’