The communities that have supported nautical schools (New York and Boston, for example) have had the end in view for which the measure of the commission was designed. Graduates of these schools are among the best officers in our merchant marine, and this, too, in spite of the fact that antiquated ships of the sail formerly served as school rooms, and the boys were taught to handle the obsolete marline-spike instead of the throttle. But, at best, these efforts to turn ambitious young Americans from the opportunities they find on land are inadequate. Congress might have turned the naval academy into a splendid nautical university for the education of all Americans who wish to learn the ways of the sea. We appropriate millions a year for the farmers, not as bounties on their products, but to teach them, _through experiment stations_, how to do their work. No one seems to have thought it worth while, however, to make a national appropriation for the education of merchant seamen. To confess the truth we have done nothing adequate to the situation since the Civil War, nor has anything adequate been attempted; but the people who have promoted the work of our nautical schools have seen dimly what the whole story of the American merchant marine proclaims. The pretty pinnace _Virginia_ thirty feet long, as she crossed and recrossed the Atlantic; the _Trial_ in the Azores and the West Indies; the _Mount Vernon_ as she dodged pirates, privateers, and war fleets in her seventeen-day passage from Salem to Gibraltar; the _Empress of China_ in her venture to the Far East; the sealers among the icy rocks of the Antarctic; the whalers beyond Bering's Straits; the packets of the sail as they crossed from New York to Liverpool; and the clippers that flaunted the Stars and Stripes off the weather beam of every ship they met on the Seven Seas,--in short, the whole story of the American merchant marine has been worth consideration here because it sets forth unmistakably that the superior intrinsic efficiency of the American sailor of the sail, during the contest that culminated with the perfection of the ship of the sail, gave supremacy to the American flag. We can buy ships--whole fleets of them--if we are willing to pay the price, and we can maintain them upon the high seas in like manner; but we shall never again see the Stars and Stripes triumphant upon the high seas until the American environment evolves, once more, by natural process, the nautical unit as efficient for the modern day as was our ship of the sail in the days long past. FOOTNOTES [1] This board was created by an Order in Council dated July 4 (nowhere mentioned as "a beautiful coincidence"), 1660, "to receive, hear, examine and deliberate" upon all matters concerning the colonies, and report the facts and their conclusions to the king. [2] _The Story of New England Whalers_ gives a satisfactory history of the American whale fishery.