14. The owners submit to this indirect control of their great interests for fear of giving offence to the men who furnish and control the crews. The United States has not a law which would protect owners in an effort to change the system of shipping seamen, improving their condition, or protecting them in their rights, or in increasing the number and the utility of seamen.
15. There is not a single training or school ship in this port, although Boston boasts two in successful operation. The United States laws do not require, as they should, that every ship leaving an American port, under the United States flag, should carry its complement of apprentices. Neither of these practical means of building up the merchant marine service is generally adopted in the United States, though the experience of England, and other great maritime powers, has shown the benefit and the necessity of both systems.
16. Generally speaking, the very worst enemies of the sailor in all ports are the consuls who are sent to protect them. Practically, they are the aiders and abettors of landlords. There may be exceptional cases, but I cannot venture to name them. A special investigation of consulate abuses would reveal the sailor as the most frequent victim.
I could mention other important points, if space permitted. To be brief, I have seen that the sailor is without protection from Government laws, Government agents, or the owners whose interest he serves. He is systematically robbed, imprisoned and sold into the hardest of servitude, as openly as negroes were sold a few years ago in the South. If he complains of the robbery, judges, who hold their positions by the favor of the landlords who commit the robbery, release the culprit on bail, and send the sailor to the House of Detention as a witness, where he is forgotten, or finally turned penniless into the street, to wander back to the man who robbed him, to beg for assistance and work. If he refuses to ship as landlords direct, he is forcibly put on board by legal process, or through the agency of the whiskey bottle, and in either case is sent penniless and almost naked to sea. They never complain of the terms of sale. After Jack has been on a packet ship for two months, he is glad to escape, by any means, to the ills of the boarding houses, and after enduring that slavery for a fortnight, he is only too glad to rush back to the hardships of the ocean life he lately thought so terrible. His life is one desperate effort to escape the ills he has and fly to others that he knows well enough. The sailor has no respect for Hamlet's philosophy.