h forms of sea service without enjoying the advantages
of either. Unlike navy officers, they do not have a "retired list" to look
forward to, against the time when they shall be old, decrepit, and unfit
for duty. Congress has, indeed, made provision for placing certain
specified officers on a roll called "permanent waiting orders," but this
has been but a temporary makeshift, and no officer can feel assured that
this provision will be made for him. Promotion, too, while quite as slow
as in the navy, is limited. The highest officer in the service is a
captain, his pay $2500 a year--but a sorry reward for a lifetime of
arduous labor at sea, during which the officer may have been in frequent
peril of his life, knowing all the time that for death in the discharge of
duty, the Government will pay no pension to his heirs unless the disaster
occurred while he was "cooperating with the navy." In one single year the
records of the revenue service show more than one hundred lives saved by
its activity, without taking into consideration those on vessels warned
away from dangerous points by cutters. Yet neither in pay, in provision
for their old age, or for their families in case of death met in the
discharge of duty, are the revenue officers rewarded by the Government as
are navy officers, while public knowledge and admiration for the service
is vastly less than for the navy. It is a curious phenomenon, and yet one
as old at least as the records of man, that the professional killer--that
is to say, the officer of the army or navy--has always been held in higher
esteem socially, and more lavishly rewarded, than the man whose calling it
is to save life.

To a very considerable degree the life-saving service of the United States
is an outgrowth of the revenue marine. To sojourners by the waterside, on
the shores of either ocean or lake, the trim little life-saving stations
are a familiar sight, and summer pleasure-seekers are entertained with the
exhibition drills of the crews in the surf. It is the holiday side of this
service as a rule that the people chiefly know, but its records show how
far from being all holiday pleasure it is. In 1901 the men of the
life-saving corps were called to give aid to 377 wrecked ships. Of
property in jeopardy valued at $7,354,000, they saved $6,405,035 worth. Of
93,792 human beings in peril of death in the waters, all save 979 were
saved. These are the figures relating only to considerable shipwrecks,