The remedy must not be outside the difficulty.  You may build “Bethels” into which the sailor won’t come, and “Homes” where he won’t stay, distribute ship-loads of tracts, and scatter Bibles broadcast, but you will still have your work to do.  The Bethel, the Home, and the Bible are all right, but they are for the shore, and the sailor’s home is on the sea.  It points an address prettily, no doubt, to picture a group of pious sailors reading their Bibles aloud of a Sunday afternoon, and entertaining each other with profound theological remarks, couched in hazy nautical language.  But what is the real truth of the case?  It may be a ship close-hauled, with Cape Horn under her lee,—­all hands on deck for twelve hours,—­sleet, snow, and storm,—­the slide over the forecastle hatchway,—­no light below by which to make out a line even of the excellent type of the American Bible Society, and on deck a gale blowing that would take the leaves bodily out of any book short of a fifteenth-century folio,—­this, with the men now reefing and now shaking out topsails and every other thing, as the gale rages or lulls, in the hope of working to windward of certain destruction.

The remedy, to be effectual, must touch the seaman’s calling.  It is of no use to appeal to his better nature, if he hasn’t any.  If you make a drudge and a beast of him, you can’t do him much good by preaching at him.  The working of the present system is, that there are afloat a set of fellows who are a sort of no-countrymen.  Like the beach-combers of the Pacific, they have neither country, home, nor friends, and are as different from the old class of American sailors as the condottiere from the loyal soldier.  Let the navigation-laws be enforced first of all, and see that the due proportion of the crews of every ship be native-born.  Let the custom-house protections be no longer the farce they are,—­where a man who talks of “awlin haft the main tack” is set down as a native of Martha’s Vineyard, and his messmate, who couldn’t say “peas” without betraying County Cork, is permitted to hail from the interior of Pennsylvania.  Let the ship-owners combine (it is for their interest) to do away with the whole body of shipping-agents, middlemen, and land-sharks.  Jack will take his pleasure ashore,—­you can’t help that; and perhaps so would you, Sir, after six months of “old horse” and stony biscuit, with a leaky forecastle and a shorthanded crew.  Jack will take his pleasure, and that in ways we may all of us object to; but, for Heaven’s sake, break up a system of which the whole object is to degrade the man into the mere hack of a set of shore harpies.  Do not leave him in the hands of those whom you are now permitting to combine with you to clear him out as swiftly as possible, and then dispatch him to sea.  Let the captains ship their own crews on board the ship, and do away with the system of advances.  But, at any rate, do learn to treat the sailor as if he were not altogether a fool.  He has sense,