mentalism, but a
good, earnest, practical handling of the matter. We call our merchants
princes. If wealth and lavish expenditure make the prince, they are,
indeed, fit peers of Esterhazy or Lichtenstein. But the true princely
heart looks after the humblest of its subjects. When the poor of Lyons
were driven from their homes by the flooded Rhone, Louis Napoleon urged
his horse breast-deep into the tide to see with his own eyes that his
people were thoroughly rescued. The merchant whose clippers have coined
him gold should spare more than a passing thought upon the men who hung
over the yards and stood watchful at the wheel. England's earls can
afford to look after the toiling serfs in their collieries; the
patricians of New York and Boston might read as startling a page as
ever darkened a Parliamentary Blue-book, with a single glance into
Cherry and Ann Streets.

For a thousand years the Anglo-Saxon race has been sending its
contributions to the nation of the Men of the Sea. Ever since the
Welshman paddled his coracle across Caernarvon Bay, and Saxon Alfred
mused over the Danish galley wrecked upon his shore, each century has
been adding new names of fame to the Vikings' bead-roll. Is the list
full? has Valhalla no niche more for them? and must the men of the sea
pass away forever? If it must be so,--it must. _Che sara sara_. But if
there is no overruling Fate in this, but only the working of casual
causes, it is somebody's care that they be removed. In almost all
handicrafts and callings the last thirty years have wrought a vast and
rapid deterioration of the men who fill them. Machinery, the boasted
civilizer, is the true barbarizer. The sea has not escaped. Its men are
not what the men of old were. The question is, Can we let them go?--can
they be dispensed with among the elements of national greatness?

Passing fair is Venice, but she sits in lonely widowhood in the
deserted Adriatic. Amalfi crouches under her cliffs in the shame of her
poverty. The harbors of Tyre and Carthage are lonesome pools. They tell
their own story. When the men of the sea no longer find a home or a
welcome on the shore,--when they are driven to become the mere
hirelings who fight the battles of commerce, like other hirelings they
will serve beneath the flag where the pay and the provant are most
abundant. The vicissitudes of traffic are passing swift in these latter
days; and it does not lie beyond the reach of a possible future that
the