by Hogarth’s famous pictures is as applicable to them that go down to the sea in ships as to the workers at the loom.  It is doubtful, too, whether the sailor is either more gullible or more dissolute when in port than the cowboy when in town for a day’s frolic, or the miner just in camp with a pocket full of dust, after months of solitude on his claim.  Men are much of a sort, whatever their calling.  After weeks of monotonous and wearing toil, they are apt to go to extremes when the time for relaxation comes.  Men whose physical natures only are fully developed seek physical pleasures, and the sailor’s life is not one to cultivate a taste for the quieter forms of recreation.

But the romance that has always surrounded the sailor’s character, his real improvidence, and his supposedly unique simplicity have, in some slight degree, redounded to his advantage.  They have led people in all lands to form organizations for his aid, protection, and guidance, hospitals to care for him in illness, asylums and homes to provide for the days of his old age and decrepitude.  Best known of all these charitable institutions for the good of Jack Tar is the Sailor’s Snug Harbor, whose dignified buildings on Staten Island look out across the finest harbor in the world to where New York’s tall buildings tower high above the maintop-gallant mast of the biggest ship ever built.  This institution, founded just one hundred years ago by the will of Captain Robert R. Randall, himself an American sailor of the old type, who amassed his fortune trading to all the countries on the globe, now has an income of $400,000 annually, and cares for 900 old sailors, each of whom must have sailed for at least five years under the American flag.

* * * * *

A new chapter in the story of the American sailor is opening as this book is closed.  The period of the decadence of the American merchant marine is clearly ended, and everything gives assurance that the first quarter of this new century will do as much toward re-establishing the United States flag on the high seas as the first quarter of the nineteenth century did toward first putting it there.  As these words are being written, every shipyard in the United States is busy, and some have orders that will tax their capacity for three years to come.  New yards are being planned and small establishments, designed only to build pleasure craft, are reaching out after greater things.  The two biggest steamships ever planned are building near New London, where four years ago was no sign of shipyard or factory.  The Great Lakes and the Pacific coast ring with the sound of the steel ship-builder’s hammer.