the consumption-laden atmosphere of the starving journeyman-tailor’s garret, the slow inhalation of pulverized steel with which the needle-maker draws his every breath!  The sea’s work makes a man, and leaves him with his duty nobly done, a man at the last.  Courage, loyal obedience, patient endurance, the abnegation of selfishness,—­these are the lessons the sea teaches.  Why must the shore make such diabolical haste and try such fiendish ingenuity to undo them?  The sea is pure and free, the land is firm and stable,—­but where they meet, the tide rises and falls, leaving a little belt of sodden mud, of slippery, slimy weeds, where the dead refuse of the sea is cast up to rot in the hot sun.  Something such is the welcome the men of the sea get from that shore which they serve.  Into this Serbonian bog between them and us we let them flounder, instead of building out into their domain great and noble piers and wharves, upon which they can land securely and come among us.

Some years ago, a young scholar was led to step forth from his natural sphere into the forecastle of a merchantman.  No quarrel with the world, no romantic fancy, drove him thither, but a plain common-sense purpose.  He saw what he saw fairly, and he has told the tale in a volume which, for picturesque clearness, vigor, and manly truthfulness, will scarcely find its equal this side the age of Elizabeth.  He owed it to the sea, for the sea gave him health, self-reliance, and fearlessness, and that persistent energy which saved him from becoming that which elegant tastes and native refinement make of too many of our young men, a mere literary or social dilettante, and raised him up to be a champion of right, a chivalrous defender of the oppressed, whose name has honored his calling.  His book was an effort in the right direction.  By that we of the land were brought nearer to those to whom this country owes so much, its merchant-seamen.  But we want more than the work, however noble, of one man.  We want the persistent and Christian interest in the elevation of the seaman of every man who is connected with his calling.  We do not want a Miss-Nancyish nor Rosa-Matildan sentimentalism, but a good, earnest, practical handling of the matter.  We call our merchants princes.  If wealth and lavish expenditure make the prince, they are, indeed, fit peers of Esterhazy or Lichtenstein.  But the true princely heart looks after the humblest of its subjects.  When the poor of Lyons were driven from their homes by the flooded Rhone, Louis Napoleon urged his horse breast-deep into the tide to see with his own eyes that his people were thoroughly rescued.  The merchant whose clippers have coined him gold should spare more than a passing thought upon the men who hung over the yards and stood watchful at the wheel.  England’s earls can afford to look after the toiling serfs in their collieries; the patricians of New York and Boston might read as startling a page as ever darkened a Parliamentary Blue-book, with a single glance into Cherry and Ann Streets.