Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 2).djvu/610

 *lution, the Honorable Company has encouraged the formation of a class of Commanders and Officers for their particular service, and your Memorialists, under that encouragement, have been induced to enter the service, and have committed their prospects in life to your Honorable Company; and now that the service, from no fault of your Memorialists, from no decline in trade or natural fluctuation of events, but by the violent hand of power, and with views to public policy, is destroyed, your Memorialists confidently rely upon the justice of your Honorable Court to award them compensation. The policy of the Honorable Company, in thus forming Officers for their Commercial Navy, was based upon the most accurate view of their own interest and advantage. The Maritime Service of your Honorable Company was one of great trust and responsibility. The most valuable cargoes were necessarily entrusted to your Commanders, and such was the confidence justly reposed in them, that this property was left altogether uninsured either against sea-risk or barattry. Without assuming extraordinary merit to your Memorialists, they confidently assert that this important pecuniary saving could not have been effected but by Commanders and Officers who had been educated for, and brought up in, the particular service: your Memorialists, however, find that the qualifications which were so important to the service of your Honorable Company are of small account in the open trade system, and Ship-Owners object to employ individuals who have navigated only in vessels of so high a class of equipment as those in the service of your Honorable Company. This is no fancied evil.

The education and habits of your Memorialists as Officers of the Company's service afford a decided objection to their employment in the free trade; and in proof of this fact, your Memorialists beg to state, that although the tonnage now engaged in the trade to India and China has doubled, not one-fifth of the Officers of the Company's service have obtained employment.

Your Memorialists moreover entered the service of your Honorable Company from their interest in that particular connection. That interest is of no avail to advance them in another service; and even were employment obtained, your Memorialists could not look to be remunerated upon a scale in any degree commensurate with the emolument derived from the Company's service, where higher qualifications were required and paid for.