Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 3).djvu/571

 for retaining their earnings. But they do not. Why? Because the Legislature has encouraged their natural and proverbially improvident habits, by acknowledging a system of advance of wages unknown to any other class of workmen, on which advance they depend for an outfit, after too frequently squandering the wages they had earned on a previous voyage.

But I should prefer my readers considering carefully the Report of the Commissioners on this subject instead of my own views, and therefore I do not hesitate to give these conclusions at length, as a large mass of evidence was brought before them. They, as statesmen and philanthropists, had no object in view beyond the national good, and, more especially, the welfare of the seafaring population.

"The evidence before us leads to the conclusion that the system of advance notes is one great obstacle to the amelioration of the condition of merchant seamen. All the witnesses whom we have examined admit that the system is most pernicious, but it is defended on the ground that, without this advance, the sailor could not pay for his lodging on shore, or procure the clothes requisite for him when he joins a ship.

"In practice it seems that the advance note is handed over to the lodging-house keeper, not usually in exchange for cash, but in discharge of debts which the sailor has been induced to incur. The lodging-house keeper charges a heavy discount, and the