It is the beautiful and touching custom, too, for mourners to offer a memorial lifeboat to the memory of their dead, instead of a painted window or a showy monument.  But with all this genuine feeling and actual expenditure of time and money the fact remains that the loss of human life from shipwreck is five hundred per cent. larger on the coast of Great Britain than on our own, although there are 242 stations on their comparatively small extent of shore, and but 104 on our whole Atlantic seaboard.  In three cases of shipwreck on the English coast in 1875 the loss of life was directly traceable to the lack of some necessary appliance or to the absence of guards at the stations.  In one instance there were no means of telegraphing for boats or aid:  in the case of the Deutschland, as late as last November, where the disaster occurred on a stretch of coast known as the most dangerous in England (except that of Norfolk)—­a spot where shipwrecks have been numbered literally by thousands—­there was no lifeboat nor any means of taking a line to the ship.  The secret of these failures lies in the fact that the institution relies for its work on spontaneous service and emotion, and is not, like ours, a legalized, systematic business.  No permanent force or watch is kept at the stations:  a reward of seven shillings is paid to anybody who gives notice of a wreck to the coxswain of the boat.  The crews of the boats are volunteers, and if they do not happen to report themselves at the time of a disaster, their places are filled with any good oarsmen who offer.  In short, the whole system is based upon the occasional zeal and heroism of men, instead of tried and paid skill, fitness for the work and a simple sense of duty.

Our own life-saving service is founded on wholly different principles.  It dates from 1848, when Hon. William Newell of New Jersey (incited probably by the recent terrible loss of the John Minturn, of which the captain told us) brought before Congress the frightful dangers of the coast of that State, and procured an appropriation of ten thousand dollars for “providing surf boats, carronades, etc. for the better protection of life and property from shipwreck on the coast between Sandy Hook and Little Egg Harbor.”  The next session a similar appropriation was obtained.  Small houses were built and furnished, but no persons were paid or authorized to take charge of them, and the business was managed in the well-meaning but slipshod English fashion.  In 1854 the wreck of the Powhatan on Squan Beach and the loss of three hundred lives produced a storm of public indignation which aroused Congress, and twenty thousand dollars were appropriated for lifeboats, etc. for the coast of New Jersey, and a similar sum for the ocean side of Long Island.  A superintendent was appointed for each coast and a keeper for each of the houses, but for sixteen years no regular crews were employed.  It was during this period, too, that the petty offices of superintendent