Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 3).djvu/498

 Laws; the improved classification of ships; nautical schools; courts of inquiry into shipwrecks; tribunals for the settlement of disputes; savings-banks for seamen, and asylums for them in old age or when unfit for duty; and, above all, "discouragement of drinking on board," while attention was called "to the vast superiority in officers, crews, and equipments, and to the consequent superior success and growth of American shipping."

To remedy many of these evils various Acts of Parliament were passed, to most of which I have already referred, and, presently, I shall refer at length to the great changes for the better made since then in the classification of our ships by Lloyd's Register and other private associations; but some years elapsed before the more important of these recommendations were carried into effect. In the meantime, the new organisation in connection with the classification of ships, which had been established in 1834, stirred up, no doubt, by the report of the Committee, was laying the foundation for that career of success which has since attended its efforts. Other similar associations followed; one in Liverpool, which was afterwards amalgamated with Lloyd's Register, and the Veritas, a foreign association, still carrying on its useful work in this country, though to a limited extent, but largely in Canada, as well as on the Continent and in the United States of America.

The Committee of 1843, confirming the recommendations of its predecessor in 1836, added to them the survey of passenger ships; amendments in the law of pilotage, the establishment of signals by sound at the principal lighthouses, and of rocket