But, strangely enough, the training is of very little real service to the lads when they go to sea to earn their living. For at once they find themselves under such conditions as they never before dreamed of. In place of the perfect discipline and stringent rules to which they have been accustomed, they find the greatest laxity prevailing. Rules are almost non-existent. In the training ship each of them had his work allotted to him. When the signal was given he knew just what to do, and how to do it; and when it was done, he was done too. In the merchant ship the rigging is different, the method is different, and instead of his having any set duties, he is at everybody's beck and call, given tasks to accomplish single-handed that he has been taught to do man-of-war fashion--that is, with so many hands that the work was done like magic, and in a few seconds a sail was furled or set, or a mast was sent up or down.
They cannot now keep themselves clean and smart-looking. For, in the first place, they have little time allowed, and, in the next, there is not much water (in sailing ships). No longer is it necessary that they should present themselves at stated hours for inspection; no longer is every movement of theirs regulated as if by clock-work. They may be as slovenly, as dirty as they list, there is no one to enforce upon them the keeping of the good rules they have so long been under; and that principally because those who bear rule over them know that such enforcement is impossible. So that the carefully instilled habits of order, regularity, and cleanliness are broken down at once, and in place of the smartly-clad, well-set-up youth who joined the ship, there is presently seen a slouchy, shifty-eyed gamin, who is a profound student of the art of "dodging Pompey," who gets the well-deserved character from his shipmates of being "a young sailor, but a d---- old soldier." There is a greater evil, if possible, than this impending. It is that all the careful training of the lad shall presently be of no avail whatever; because, mixing freely with the crew, he is sedulously taught that the sea as a profession or calling is played out. "Why, just look at it a minnit," says his mentor. "You've never got no time to call yer own" (which is a lie, in an English ship, at any rate), "yer everybody's dorg, yer fed wuss'n a pig, and what y' got t' look forrward ter? T' die in the wukkus. 'Sides, 'n Englishman don't like ter be mucked up all the time with a lot er foreigners in one of his country ships. Why, they looks down on us now 'sif we wus a---- lot of interlopers wot got no right to sail under owr own flag. 'N, after all, wot are yer? Never nothin' but a dirty sailor all yer days. Nobody 'shore knows nothin' about yer; 'n don' care neither. Y' ain't got no vote, y' ain't got no home, y'r jest a bit of wreckage. Quit it, me son, 'n git a job ashore, where, if you're a bloomin' scavenger, you've got yer pull on the vestrymin, because you've got a vote, an' if they don't look after your interests, w'y, out they goes; see!"