Page:The Blight of Insubordination.djvu/94

86 To reconcile the shipmanagers' dictum that they are not concerned in nationality, all that they require is that the men shall be at once cheap and efficient, and that sufficient are available, to the demand of men, pay the men better, feed the men better, house the men better, 1s a task which no one would dare to take on single-handed with hope of success, be he never so doughty a champion. The times are keenly competitive and progressive, and here, as well as in other paths in life, men must warrant their existence. That the Lascar has thoroughly and amply justified his mission in the present day British merchant vessel cannot be denied by anyone competent to judge of the matter, unless sentiment is permitted to override the practical side of the question that is not merely national, but Imperial.

In response to the Parliamentary pressure exerted by Sir, M.P., the President of the Board of Trade invited Mr. Darasha R. Chichgar, the chief representative of a family of licensed shipping brokers of the Bombay Shipping Office, to come to England at the public expense to give evidence before the committee sitting under the presidency of Sir Francis Jeune, on behalf of the Lascars.

At a great mass meeting held in Bombay a few days before the Lascar's envoy embarked for England they requested him to say that all they asked was that the justice of non-interference might be done to them, and as loyal and contented British subjects they might be left to earn their living as heretofore. They had petitioned Parliament not to give legislative sanction to proposals the indirect effect of which would be to expel them from British ships, thus depriving them of an occupation for which they are eminently fitted by birth and training. Soon after the envoy's arrival in England he appeared before the Manning Committee and had an innings of five or six hours in the witness chair on the first occasion.

Pressed by Mr. J. H. Wilson, of the Seamen's Union, to draw general comparisons between the Lascars and the British seamen, unfavourable to the latter, the wily Mr. Wilson did not get much change out of the astute Parsee, who said he had not gone there to say anything derogatory to British sailors; his duty was to uphold the right of the Lascars to follow the calling to which they had been trained for generations, and for which they were physically well fitted.

Mr. Chichgar even urged that, so far from it being desirable in the interests of our naval defences to restrict the employment of Lascars they should be looked upon as forming the raw material for a most useful, as well as numerous, body of supplementary