As a final reason for the decadence of the American merchant marine, note that the conditions of life in the American forecastle had greatly changed, and that this change began when the American ships were winning their laurels. With the advent of the packet system the "private venture" method of adding to a sailor's income disappeared, and with it one strong inducement to the young men who thought of going to sea. Then the old custom of making the forecastle a schoolroom, with the ship's officers serving as instructors in navigation, died out. The very prosperity of the American merchant marine served to deteriorate the quality of American seamen, for the number of ships increased much more rapidly than the seafaring population. Foreign sailors were employed for lack of enough Americans. In time even the number of experienced foreigners was insufficient. Captain J. S. Clark testified before the committee of Congress mentioned above that he had taken a ship to sea with "but two men out of a crew of sixty who could steer." With the employment of foreigners the pleasant relations that had existed between the forecastle and cabin came to an end. The officers who had been shipmates with crews of ambitious young Americans found the foreign sailors, with their lack of ambition--with a certain slowness of movement, in fact--exasperating, especially when topsails were to be reefed after "carrying on" somewhat too long! This exasperation, with race or national prejudices to increase it, was what led to the use of the belaying pin and the pump-brake for the "encouragement" of sailors who failed to "show willing." Naturally, as time passed, the treatment of sailors grew worse, and an American statute which required the sailor to prove malice or revenge on the part of an assailing officer, when he had the officer arrested for ill treatment, did but add to the horrors of a passage on a driven ship. Dana, in his _Two Years Before the Mast_, describes mildly the treatment which common sailors received in American ships in his day. Jewell's _Among Our Sailors_ describes the cruelty more in detail. It was a common thing for captains to torture men, and men were sometimes killed by the brutality which they could not escape. And while the conditions in the American forecastle were growing worse, those in the British were growing better. In 1869 Captain Cyrus F. Sargeant, the well-known ship-owner, testified that "the wages of sailors are lower in an American ship than in an English ship." It is well known that the port makes the wages for the forecastle, but it was true, then, that seamen on British liners, at least, saved more money in a year than the men on American ships. The testimony taken before the Merchant Marine Commission, in 1904 (p. 1263), contains the following paragraph, the truthfulness of which was not disputed:--