At one time this abuse of the law became such a powerful instrument of extortion that captains and officers, innocent of any wrong, unless the protection of life and property be regarded as wrong, were compelled to leave their ships in the harbor of New York before they hauled alongside the wharf, in order to escape prosecution, and were made to appear like criminals fleeing from justice. This cannot be considered a very cheerful welcome home after a voyage round the globe. Yet it compares not unfavorably with the reception sometimes accorded the returning traveller nowadays--at the hands of officers of the law empowered to collect “protective” duties on personal effects. After a while this nefarious trade, by which ship-owners, captains, officers, and crews were alike defrauded, perished by its own rapacity; but the attitude of the United States Government of half a century ago in permitting her splendid American merchant captains and officers to be subjected to gross indignities, and the foreign seamen sailing under her flag to be robbed and shipped away without their knowledge or consent, must ever remain a blot upon the page of American maritime history. Those well-intentioned philanthropists who had an idea that sailors were being ill-treated on board American ships, and who wasted sympathy upon a class of men most of whom required severe discipline, might have been better employed had they exerted their energies toward purging the seaports of the country of the dens of vice and gangs of robbers that infested them, though this might not have been so romantic as a sentimental interest in the welfare of the sailor when encountering the supposed terrors of the deep. As a matter of fact, the lives, limbs, and morals of sailors at that period were very much safer at sea than they were on land.