Serving a purpose akin to the lighthouses, are the post and range-lights on the great rivers of the West.  Very humble devices, these, in many instances, but of prodigious importance to traffic on the interior waterways.  A lens lantern, hanging from the arm of a post eight or ten feet high, and kept lighted by some neighboring farmer at a cost of $160 a year, lacks the romantic quality of a lighthouse towering above a hungry sea, but it is because there are nearly two thousand such lights on our shallow and crooked rivers that we have an interior shipping doing a carrying trade of millions a year, and giving employment to thousands of men.

Chief among the sailors’ safeguards is the service performed by the United States revenue cutters.  The revenue cutter service, like the lighthouse system, was established very shortly after the United States became a nation by the adoption of the Constitution.  Its primary purpose, of course, is to aid in the enforcement of the revenue laws and to suppress smuggling.  The service, therefore, is a branch of the Treasury Department, and is directly under the charge of the Secretary of the Treasury.  In the course of years, however, the revenue cutter service has extended its functions.  In time of war, the cutters have acted as adjuncts to the navy, and some of the very best armed service on the high seas has been performed by them.  Piracy in the Gulf of Mexico was largely suppressed by officers of revenue cutters, and pitched battles have more than once been fought between small revenue cutters and the pirates of the Louisiana and the Central American coasts.

But the feature of the service which is of particular pertinence to our story of American ships and sailors, is the part that it has taken in aiding vessels that were wrecked, or in danger of being wrecked.  Many years ago, the Secretary of the Treasury directed the officers of the revenue marine to give all possible aid to vessels in distress wherever encountered.  Perhaps the order was hardly necessary.  It is the chiefest glory of the sailor, whether in the official service, or in the merchant marine, that he has never permitted a stranger ship to go unaided to destruction, if by any heroic endeavor he could save either the ship or her crew.  The annals of the sea are full of stories of captains who risked their own vessels, their own lives, and the lives of their people, in order to take castaways from wrecked or foundering vessels in a high sea.  But the records of the revenue marine service are peculiarly fruitful of such incidents, because it was determined some thirty years ago that cutters should be kept cruising constantly throughout the turbulent winter seasons for the one sole purpose of rendering aid to vessels in distress.  In these late years, when harbors are thoroughly policed, and when steam navigation has come to dominate the ocean, there is little use for the revenue cutter in its primary quality of a foe to smugglers.  People who smuggle come over in the cabins of the finest ocean liners, and the old-time contraband importer, of the sort we read of in “Cast Up By The Sea,” who brings a little lugger into some obscure port under cover of a black night, has entirely disappeared.