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- better classes of people, and cut off from all access to respectable
and improving society; consider all this, and the reflecting mind must
very soon perceive that the case of sailors, as a class, is not a very
promising one.
Indeed, the bad things of their condition come under the head of those
chronic evils which can only be ameliorated, it would seem, by
ameliorating the moral organization of all civilization.
Though old seventy-fours and old frigates are converted into chapels,
and launched into the docks; though the “Boatswain’s Mate” and other
clever religious tracts in the nautical dialect are distributed among
them; though clergymen harangue them from the pier-heads: and chaplains
in the navy read sermons to them on the gun-deck; though evangelical
boarding-houses are provided for them; though the parsimony of
ship-owners has seconded the really sincere and pious efforts of
Temperance Societies, to take away from seamen their old rations of
grog while at sea:—notwithstanding all these things, and many more, the
relative condition of the great bulk of sailors to the rest of mankind,
seems to remain pretty much where it was, a century ago.
It is too much the custom, perhaps, to regard as a special advance,
that unavoidable, and merely participative progress, which any one
class makes in sharing the general movement of the race. Thus, because
the sailor, who to-day steers the Hibernia or Unicorn steam-ship across
the Atlantic, is a somewhat different man from the exaggerated sailors
of Smollett, and the men who fought with Nelson at Copenhagen, and
survived to riot themselves away at North Corner in Plymouth;—because
the modem tar is not quite so gross as heretofore, and has shaken off
some of his shaggy jackets, and docked his Lord Rodney
queue:—therefore, in the estimation of some observers, he has begun to
see the evils of his condition, and has voluntarily improved. But upon
a closer scrutiny, it will be seen that he has but drifted along with
that great tide, which, perhaps, has two flows for one ebb; he has made
no individual advance of his own.
There are classes of men in the world, who bear the same relation to
society at large, that the wheels do to a coach: and are just as
indispensable. But however easy and delectable the springs upon which
the insiders pleasantly vibrate: however sumptuous the hammer-cloth,
and glossy the door-panels; yet, for all this, the wheels must still
revolve in dusty, or muddy revolutions. No contrivance, no sagacity can
lift _them_ out of the mire; for upon something the coach must be
bottomed; on something the insiders must roll.
Now, sailors form one of these wheels: they go and come round the
globe; they are the true importers, and exporters of spices and silks;
of fruits and wines and marbles; they carry missionaries, embassadors,
opera-singers, armies, merchants, tourists, and scholars to their
destination: they are a bridge of boats across the Atlantic; they are
the _primum mobile_ of all commerce; and, in short, were they to
emigrate in a body to man the navies of the moon, almost every thing
would stop here on earth except its revolution on its axis, and the
orators in the American Congress.
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