“I saw men abused, beaten into insensibility,” he said. “I saw sailors try to escape from brutal masters and from unseaworthy vessels upon which they had been lured to serve. I saw them hunted down and thrown into the ship’s hold in chains. I know the bitterness of it all from experience.” And he had seen over-insured and under-manned ships go down at sea because greedy owners would not furnish skilled seamen or provide lifeboats. He had lived to see white labor driven out by the shipping trust to make way for oriental slaves, and the sea power moving unmistakably to the orient as a result. This condition was all the more bitter to Andrew Furseth, for he knew and loved the sea and its romantic history and knew that seamen had once been free men. He determined to dedicate his life to doing for the seamen what Lincoln did for the slaves, and he landed on the Pacific coast of America. “For the seamen of the world,” wrote John L. Mathews in _Everybody’s Magazine_, “the most important event of the nineteenth century was the coming ashore of Andrew Furseth.” His first step was to challenge the greed of the shipping interests by organizing the seamen along the coast. The organization was small and its membership pitifully poor, and it faced the bitter hostility of powerful interests and a prejudiced or subsidized press. Knowing that the seamen of the world would not be freed by his little organization alone, he went to Washington as its representative. That was in 1894. The following twenty-one years of Furseth’s life mark the greatness of the man. So low had the seaman fallen in the estimation of the world that this man with no other motive than to secure the enactment of legislation was under police espionage and for years was shadowed by detectives. His persecutors wasted money--his life was in the open. Year after year he pressed his case on members of the congress. Many were openly hostile. Some mildly curious. None greatly interested. Sometimes his bill was introduced and quietly smothered in committee. Sometimes he could find no one to present it. Men of less heroic mould have succumbed to despair. Furseth never despaired. He never stormed at fate. He persevered. He was like the character in Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea. Working for a ridiculously small salary, when hard times came upon the country he voluntarily cut his own pay. With no small vices to feed, he found he could exist on next to nothing in a sailors’ boarding house. Asked once if he had laid anything aside for old age, he made an answer that deserves to live: “When my work is finished, I hope to be finished. I have made no provision against old age, and I shall borrow no fears from time.”