Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 3).djvu/371

 *owner, do not in the least tend to the advantage, comfort, or safety of the passengers;" the consequence of so much being left to the discretion of the Emigration officer leading, as they thought, to this, that the mode of fitting out emigrant vessels depends mainly on his will, and varies, therefore, with each port from which the vessel sails. The "fiend discretion," as a well-known writer has described it, is no doubt ever abhorrent to Englishmen, who watch, with Constitutional jealousy, the rights of property and of the subject. But it is, indeed, the cardinal difficulty of administration. A hard and fast law stops improvement, and reduces everything to a dead level. Discretion may be tyranny. The experience, however, of the frauds, oppression, and cruelties, practised in former years on the unprotected emigrant, will, I doubt not, continue to operate on the Legislature, and will prevent them from relaxing many portions of the present rigorous system, which has at least produced various salutary improvements.

Though modifications and alterations have been made in the Passenger Act of 1855, the most important of which has been the transfer of its management from the Emigration Commissioners to the Board of Trade, its leading principles are still unchanged, and these, in their main features, have now been adopted by nearly all other countries. The changes most worthy of note are to be found (Clause 35, &c.) in the Merchant Shipping Acts Amendment Act of 1862, which gives the owner or master of any passenger ship power to reject, as a passenger, any "drunken or disorderly" person; or to land