THE SACRED BROTHERHOOD OF THE SEA.
X/ R. HAVELOCK WILSON'S spirited and timely appeal 1111 to the Trades Unions on behalf of the League of Seamen gives us an opportunity which we have long desired to say what we feel in regard to the Merchant Seamen of Great Britain. They are men whom neither pay, nor praise, nor ambition have made bold. They have faced death and wounds and the terror and anguish of the sea unsupported by the grandeur and prestige of a great and historic fighting .Service like the Royal Navy or the Army. They have never had the limelight upon them either in Peace or War. The Merchant Seamen are humble men who can never, even in dreams, have been dazzled by the thought that perhaps they might rise to high commands and great honours. They know perfectly well that the palpable glories of a Service could, under no possible conditions, fall to their let. What they have done they have done solely and entirely from a sense of duty—naked duty—and they have done it in the shadow. There is practically no instance of a Merchant Seaman refusing to go to sea because of the new and terrible dangers which war and the submarine campaign have added to his already perilous way of life. No one could have blamed the men of the Mercantil) Marine if they had declared that the sea had become too dangerous
for mere weekly wage-earners, and that if the nation must have its oversee. supplies, then the work must be done either by men enlisted for the purpose, with pay and pension in proportion to the risk, or else the burden must be shared equally, like the military burden under Conscription, by all men and all classes. They have made no claims of this sort, nor even dreamt of making any. They have never struck for higher pay or better conditions or shown, even in the very slightest degree, any inclination to exploit the nation's difficulties in their own behalf. No doubt their pay has risen, like that of all workers throughout the country, but their voices have not been heard in public wranglings.
Only on one matter have they insisted that we should listen to them. They have told us in plain terms that " the sacred brother- hood of the sea " shall not be lightly destroyed, and that those who have dared to lay a sacrilegious hand thereon must receive the punishment that they deserve. Further, they have insisted that the British dupes of German socialistic sophistry shall not be allowed to make excursions on the Continent, and to pose at Con- ferences and Conventions as the representatives of the British working man. Though they have not refused to go to sea under ordinary conditions, they have refused to risk their lives in order to afford facilities for Mr. Ramsay MacDonald to assure his "German friends " that the last thing the British working man wants to do is to insist that the peoples of Alsace-Lorraine, of Prussian Poland, and of Schleswig shall be saved from the German yoke, and that he is perfectly content to allow the Colonies in which Germany maintained slavery and forced labour to be returnqd to her with those institutions unimpaired by our temporary occupation.
The British Merchant Seamen, many of whom have been cast away in the boats of torpedoed vessels three or four times, are yet in their glorious if silent pride always ready to sign on again. They stand fit representatives of that spirit which Shakespeare has drawn with such sympathy and force in Henry IV. In the famous Conscription Scene the poet makes the humblest, and socially least considered man, the true hero of the war. " By my troth, I care not," he says, " a man can die but once : we owe God a death : ne'er bear a base mind : an't be my destiny, so ; an't be not so, so : no man is too good to serve his country; and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next." Even Bardolph is moved to exclaim, " Well said ; thou'rt a good fellow," to be met with the simple reiteration, " Faith, I'll bear no base mind." There stands to the life the Merchant Seaman of England—the man who has never borne, and never will bear, a base mind.
In view of a record so noble, so self-sacrificing, so full of those qualities which in England mark the spirit of the true gentle- man, it is astonishing that our rulers and governors have failed to suggest any public and adequate recognition of the services of our Merchant Sailors. 'While almost everybody else who has done anything, or talked or written sufficiently loudly about doing anything, has received rewards and honours in showers, the men and officers of our Merchant Ships, with few exceptions, have gained neither honours nor emoluments. A newspaper paragraph has been their reward In our opinion this official neglect (we admit, of course, that the nation as a whole has been intensely proud of its Merchant Seamen and that their deeds, wherever possible, have been recorded by the Press) should be- remedied at once. We desire to make two suggestions. The first is that the good old tradition of the thanks of Parliament shall be revived, and that both Houses of Parliament, on the most honorific precedent known to the Records, shall vote their thanks to the Merchant Seamen, officers and men, of the British Empire for the patriotism and self-sacrifice which they have shown through- out the war. But this by itself is not enough. We think that Parliament should also vote a sum of money for a public monument, and one of no mean order, to the 15,000 seamen whose lives have been sacrificed to the appalling crimes of the Germans when they broke the wise and humane rule and custom of war at sea that the destruction of Merchant Shipping must only be under conditions that allowed the saving of the crew. " Sink and leave no trace " is piracy and murder pure and simple.
When the war with Napoleon was over, Flaxman, one of the greatest of English artists, asked Parliament to vote money for erecting a national monument on Greenwich Hill to commemorate the sea-power of Britain. The monument, as designed by Flaxman, was to take the form of a statue of Britannia, some two hundred feet high. Unfortunately, Parliament was not enterprising enough to avail itself of Flaxman's scheme, and thee,opportunity was lost. Perhaps, English-like, they shrank from the idea of commemorating a pure abstraction like the Command of the Sea, for the French privateers of the Napoleonic epoch, though they destroyed as much of our Merchant Shipping as the submarines, did not butcher our sailors. We, alas, have the sacrifice of 15,000 noble-minded men to call in remembrance. The designs for Flaxman's naval memorial and the statue on Greenwich Hill are, we believe, preserved at the Soane Museum. Why should not Mr. Bolton, the enterprising and scholarly head of the Museum, who has already done so much to show the public the treasures under his control, publish an illustrated account of Flaxman's designs and allow the nation to see how far a revival of Flaxman's scheme would be suitable to the present occasion. If it is, let us adopt it. If not, then let us devise a scheme of our own worthy of so great an occasion. All we ask is that the monument should stand conspicuous in the eyes of the nation, and especially of the Port of London, the greatest mercantile port in the whole world. In the years to come let every seafarer to London River, as sailors call the Thames, see the outward and visible sign of the nation's gratitude to the seamen who did their duty undismayed. Let the monument to the 15,000 be the sacra- ment of the sacred brotherhood of the sea.
Before we leave the subject of our Merchant Seamen's sacrifices and of their public spirit, we desire to wish Mr. Havelock Wilson good luck in his spirited crusade at Derby. We are well aware that there are certain obstacles to his proposed six years' boycott of Germany. For example, it is difficult to see how we can extract from the Germans those indemnities which they ought to pay if we hold no commercial intercourse with them. You cannot make men work for you if you refuse to touch anything that they have made. At the same time, we are certain that Mr. Havelock Wilson's demand for a six years' boycott with additions for every fresh crime committed will ultimately have an enormous effect upon German public opinion. And, after all, we must not think too much of the economic side of the business. It aright be better in the end to lose a good deal of the indemnity which Germany will owe the world if by so doing we could ensure that the world should the more thoroughly learn the lesson of the War—Wickedness does not even pay. A large pecuniary sacrifice on our own part and on the part of the Allies generally might be better than failure to make mankind learn for all time that crimes like those of Germany shall not remain unpunished.
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