Page:The Blight of Insubordination.djvu/22

14 At the annual meeting of the General Shipowners' Society in 1846 (the year in which the Free Trade in Com Bill passed) in London, the chairman distinctly said that "by the Navigation Laws the British shipowner is compelled to employ exclusively the highest paid and most expensively fed seamen—those of native birth." The written words remain. Two years later,, M.P. for South Shields, introduced a deputation of Shipmasters, Mates, Seamen, and Shipwrights of Great Britain to the then Home Secretary. They brought a memorial to Her Majesty against the repeal of the Navigation Laws on the grounds " that by such a measure admitting the cheap foreign ship, half paid and ill-fed foreign seamen of which your memorialists have the most correct personal knowledge, it will reduce, by a competition the lowest in the world, the condition of your memorialists and their families, and strike a blow at their very existence."

The appeal to Her Majesty Queen Victoria—of blessed memory—was not successful. The Navigation Laws were repealed in June, 1849, after much opposition; and now, a little over half a century later, we are found facing the very conditions anticipated by the deputation in the memorial, and brought about in a great measure by a people who, since that time, have become subject to Great Britain; a direct consequence of the conquest or subjugation of India, and the altered conditions which now prevail at sea in steam traders to that part of the King's dominions. The immediate effect of the abolition of the Navigation Laws with which we are concerned was to open the door to the foreigner, even to the command of British ships, to wipe out compulsory apprenticeship among the seamen class, and to cancel the seamen's register ticket or certificate, for which, in later times, a loose separate certificate of discharge was substituted and furnished for every engagement, and which in itself has had an effect on the service generally to its detriment even to demoralisation, inasmuch as it became an easy matter to trade and traffic in them.

According to Mr., M.P. for the Exchange division of Liverpool, shipowners have a perfect right to free trade in labour. Nationality does not concern shipowners. "All they required was that the men who were shipped were at once cheap and efficient, and that sufficient were available." All these conditions obtain with the Lascar, and in this public utterance, voicing the opinion of shipowners, we have from Mr. McArthur at once the reason for the preference shown for this class of labour viewed from the shipowner's point. Much remains to be said and written of how shipmasters, officers and