But will the American sailor share in the new life of the American ship?  The question is no easy one to answer.  Modern shipping methods offer little opportunity for ambitious lads to make their way from the forecastle to the owner’s desk.  The methods by which the Cleavelands, Crowninshields, Lows, and their fellows in the early shipping trade won their success, have no place in modern economy.  As I write, the actual head of the greatest shipping concern the world has ever known, is a Wall Street banker, whose knowledge of the sea was gained from the deck of a private steam yacht or the cabin de luxe of a fast liner, and who has applied to the shipping business only the same methods of stock manipulating that made him the greatest railroad director in the world before he thought to control the ocean as well.  With steam, the sailor has become a mere deckhand; the captain a man of business and a disciplinarian, who may not know the names of the ropes on a real ship; the owner a corporation; the voyages mere trips to and fro between designated ports made with the regularity and the monotony of a sleeping-car’s trips between Chicago and San Francisco.  Until these conditions shall materially change, there is little likelihood that the sea will again attract restless, energetic, and ambitious young Americans.  Men of the type that we have described in earlier chapters of this book do not adopt a life calling that will forever keep them in subordinate positions, subject to the whims and domination of an employing corporation.  A genial satirist, writing of the sort of men who became First Lords of the Admiralty in England, said: 

    “Mind your own business and never go to sea,
     And you’ll come to be the ruler of the Queen’s navee.”

Perhaps a like situation confronts the American merchant marine in its new development.