And now let us turn to the Minority Report. It supports two of the proposals of the Majority of the Commissioners. One is that the sexes should be placed upon an equality in the matter of adultery that is to say, that proof of the simple adultery of the husband should entitle the wife to a divorce. It appears to me that this view is untenable both on physiological and on practical grounds. I do not deny that adultery in a man is as unethical as in a woman. But I do maintain that from the sociological point of view it is of far less moment. It appears to me absolute nonsense-or perhaps sickening cant would be a better description-to ignore the difference between the two sexes in respect of the erotic instinct. Man by his very nature inclines to polygamy. Woman to monogamy. The ebullient virility of the man requires to be tamed and disciplined for ordered social life by religion, or by reason, or by both. 'Woman is chaste in her inmost being'-' Das Weib ist keusch in ihrem tiefsten Wesen '-Schiller sings, and truly. Chastity is the woman's prerogative and distinctive virtue, just as courage is man's; it is the keystone of her moral character on which all her worth depends a lapse from it overthrows her spiritual being in a way which is irreparable: Læsa pudicitia nulla est reparabilis arte.' The psychical difference is enormous between the consequences of unchastity in the two sexes. And the physical differences are the counterpart of it. I need not further dwell on this matter. I observed the other day in same journal-I do not remember what, nor does it matter-that to place the two sexes on a different footing in sexual matters is to contravene the holy law of equality. The holy law of equality! The expres sion appears to me the veriest balderdash. No such law exists, and if it did exist it would be by no means holy but most unholy, as opposed to the plainest facts of life and the most elementary principles of justice. Inequality not equality is the supreme rule of life, and it reigns in the family as elsewhere: nay, the family is built upon the inequality of the sexes, and the unlikeness of one spouse fits the unlikeness of the other."

One other proposal of the Majority of the Commissioners finds favour with the Minority, and regarding it the fewest words will suffice. It is that greater facilities should be given to persons of slender means, living at a considerable distance from London, to exercise their statutory rights under the Divorce Acts. Of It also concurs in the recommendation of the Majority relating to the publication of reports of divorce and other matrimonial causes, and in certain other recommendations, of no great importance, which need not be noticed here. I need hardly say that this phrase is suggested by the beautiful lines of In Memoriam

For he was rich where I was poor,

And his unlikeness fitted mine.'

course, as they say, it is incontestable that no one ought to be deprived of his legal rights merely by poverty.' If the power to divorce is to be reckoned among the liberties of the subject, it should not be made a luxury of the well-to-do.

And now, before I lay down my pen and take leave of this most important and most painful topic, I would make one concluding observation. The signatories of the Minority Report observe: 'There are reasons at the present time which lead us to think that the State is called rather to strengthen than to relax the strictness of its marriage laws.' There are such reasons; they are only too manifest. But is there any reason to hope that the State in England, or indeed anywhere else, will adopt this course? I confess I do not see any. Throughout the civilised world the revolution in the relations of the sexes, for four centuries in progress, seems now to be reaching its logical consummation. England has followed the example of other countries haud passibus æquis.' But in the establishment of the Divorce Court in 1857 we must, I fear, discern a downward step not to be retrieved. The most sagacious publicist of the nineteenth century-so I must account M. le Playsaw in it 'a decline of public morality.' The saintly Keble, is his well-nigh forgotten tractate, Against Profane Dealing with Holy Matrimony, regarded it as a sign of a great apostasy. Surely they were right. In every subsequent year the forces among us which war against Holy Matrimony have been gathering strength and now the cry, once barely muttered, is shouted on all sides: 'Down with it, down with it, even unto the ground.' But certain it is, if any fact is certain, that the dignity of woman is bound up with that indissoluble wedlock which alone is worthy of the name of marriage. What but the consortium omnis vitæ makes a wife to differ from a concubine or a courtesan? As certain is it that with the dignity of woman is bound up all that is most precious in modern civilisation. Glory and loveliness in art, in literature, in public and private life, will pass away with the passing of marriage.

9

W. S. LILLY.

I have of course before me the Roman jurisconsult's definition of marriage : 'Nuptiæ sunt conjunctio maris et feminæ et consortium omnis vitæ; divini et humani juris communicatio.'

THE MANNING OF OUR MERCANTILE MARINE

The prosperity, strength, and safety of the United Kingdom and his Majesty's dominions do greatly depend on a large, constant, and ready supply of seamen, and it is therefore expedient to promote the increase of the number of seamen and to afford them all due encouragement and protection.

THESE words are taken from the preamble of the Merchant Shipping Act, and define what should be one of the cardinal elements in the national policy. They refer directly to merchant seamen only, on whom we depend for our national existence at all times, just as we do on naval seamen for our safety in times of war; but they also refer indirectly to the latter, as at the time at which the Act was passed the Mercantile Marine constituted an important reserve of the Navy, and was intended to be the source from which its wastage in war could be speedily and mainly recruited. That being so, the word 'seamen' in the preamble referred, it may be assumed, to British seamen, of European race, owing an undivided allegiance to his Majesty. No others would serve for naval purposes, and no aliens, no matter what their nationality, no matter how little adverse their own national traditions might be to British sympathies, could be relied upon to continue their services under the mercantile flag, with all the attendant risks of capture and imprisonment, in time of war between England and another great sea-Power. A Lascar may be defined as a seaman of Asiatic or East African birth, and the term 'Lascars,' as used in shipping circles, includes natives of India, the Straits Settlements, China, and East Africa. The majority are British subjects, but though capable seamen, whose courage in their own spheres has often been proved in the typhoons and cyclones of the Eastern seas, they have never been tried in war, and it has yet to be shown that their courage and patriotism would enable them to bear that test. During the last fifty years there has been a steady influx both of aliens and Lascars into the British Mercantile Marine, and both now constitute a very large element in its personnel. If both failed us in any great national emergency it might well

happen that a large part of the mercantile fleet, on which we are dependent for our food supplies and raw material, would have to be laid up in idleness in the harbours of the United Kingdom or of the Colonies. National starvation and industrial paralysis would be the results, realised in their completest sense if we lost, even temporarily, the command of the sea, and to a less but possibly substantial extent in any naval war.

The following table shows the number of seamen (British, alien, and Lascar) who were employed during the respective years mentioned in registered British vessels belonging to the United Kingdom :

No records are available of the number of Lascars employed prior to 1886. In 1903 the number of aliens serving in the British Mercantile Marine reached its zenith. In the same year the number of British-born seamen was less than it had been thirty-three years before, though the aggregate tonnage of British shipping had in the meantime almost doubled. From 1903 there has been a steady progressive increase in the aggregate number of British seamen and a similar decrease in that of the aliens, and the tide might therefore on first glance be said to be well turned.

But the satisfaction that might be felt in this fact has its alloy. The term 'seaman,' in Board of Trade parlance, includes every person employed in any capacity whatsoever on board a ship, not only officers, sailors, engineers, and firemen, but surgeons, pursers, stewards, stewardesses, and cattlemen, the only exceptions being masters, pilots, and indentured apprentices. In this article we purpose to deal only with sailors, the working men actively engaged in the navigation of the ship above deck, as distinct from officers and the balance of the technical seamen, whose duties are either below deck, in the engine-room or stokehole, or are in no way connected with navigation.

A quinquennial census of seamen has been made by the Registrar-General of Shipping and Seamen since 1891, and the

report of the fifth of the series, that of 1911, has just been published. From its figures it appears that an aggregate of 28,729 aliens were serving on board British ships on the 3rd of April, the day on which the census was taken. Of this aggregate, 1718 were employed in the home sea-going trade (exclusive of yachts and fishing vessels) and 27,011 in the foreign. Those engaged in the home trade, who constituted 5.3 per cent. of the whole number of seamen, British and foreign, employed in that trade, may be here disregarded, as many of them-perhaps the majority -have become British subjects in everything but name, men for the most part who have exiled themselves from their own countries in order to avoid conscription, and have their permanent homes, with their wives and families, in England, but have been unwilling or unable to incur the expense of taking out formal letters of naturalisation. Those in the foreign trade, on the other hand, have continued to be citizens of the countries of their birth, with their homes, interests, and affections still centred there, with no ties binding them to Great Britain beyond those of the ships in which they are for the moment serving; and they constituted 20.3 per cent. of the aggregate of all seamen in the trade on census day.

The percentage does not appear very formidable on first glance, but an analysis of the grades in which these aliens are serving in British merchant ships shows that they still continue to be far more prominent factors in the sailor class than might be assumed from the aggregate percentage. Of 8524 petty officers (boatswains, carpenters, quartermasters, sailmakers, etc.) employed on sailing and steam vessels in the foreign trade, 2689, or 31.5 per cent., were aliens; and of 26,358 sailors, in the same trade, 8946, or 33.9 per cent., were aliens. We are not, as already stated, dealing with firemen or trimmers in this article, but it may be mentioned that 28.9 per cent. of all men employed in those capacities were aliens. These percentages relate only to the persons actually employed on the 3rd of April 1911, the day on which the census was taken, but they may be regarded as applying approximately to the total numbers of petty officers and sailors, both British subjects and aliens, who regularly serve in British vessels.

The table on page 1115 shows that between 1906 and 1910 the aggregate number of British seamen increased from 188,340 to 201,910, and that in the same period that of alien seamen decreased from 38,084 to 30,462. While, however, the number of British seamen has continued to grow steadily, the information in the census shows that the increase has been limited to those employed in the engineers' and pursers' departments, and was especially marked in the latter, and that the number of British sailors has actually decreased, though only by 1 per cent., between