We are parted now. The Merchants' Service is no longer a studied and valued interest of the ancient corporation. In an assured position as arbiters between the State and the shipping industry, the Trinity Brethren could combine a just regard for the merchants' interest with a generous and understanding appreciation of the seamen's trials and difficulties. If for no other reason than the record of past endeavours, they should still control the personnel of the Merchants' Service, in regulating the scheme of our education, the scope of our qualification for office, the grades of our service, the essence of our sea-conduct. But in the fickle doldrums of the period when steam superseded sail as our motive power, we drifted apart. Shipping interests have become complicated with land ventures, as widely different from them as the marine engine is from our former sail plan. In 1850 the Merchants' Service was placed under control of the Board of Trade; we were handed over to a Board that is no Board--a department of the State with little, if any, sea-sentiment, and that is sternly resolved to repress all our efforts to regain a voice in the control of our own affairs. THE BOARD OF TRADE IF we may claim the ancient Corporation of Trinity House as the Alma Mater of the Merchants' Service, we may liken our comparatively new directorate, the Board of Trade, to our Alma step-Mater--an austere, bureaucratic dame, hard-working and earnest, perhaps, but lacking the kindly spirit of a sea-tradition. She is utterly out of touch and sympathy with a sea-sense--her arms, overstrained perhaps by the tremendous burden of charge upon charge that comes to her for settlement, are never open to the seamen. Sullenly, we resent her dictation as that of a usurper--a lay impropriator of our professional heritage. Under her coldly formal direction, we may attend our affairs in diligence and prudence, but for us there is no motherly licence; she has no pride in our doings (if one counts not the vicious insistence of her statistics)--we are only the stepchildren of her adoption, odd men of the huge and hybrid family over whom she has been set to cast a suspicious, if guardian, eye. While Trinity House was concerned alone with the conduct of shipping and sea-affairs, our new controllers of the Board of Trade have interests in charge as widely apart as the feeding of draught-horses and the examination of a bankrupt cheesemonger. We are but a Department. The sea-service of the nation, the key industry of our island commerce, is governed by a subdivision in a Ministry that has long outgrown the limits of a central and answerable control. Instead of settlement by a contained and competent Ministry of Marine, our highly technical sea-conduct is ruled for us in queue with longshore affairs, sandwiched, perhaps, between horse-racing and the period of the dinner table.