That, however, will require some considerable time yet. Meanwhile, the sailing ships, wooden ships too, will probably linger longest in our North American colonies. But they too must disappear. Already they are feeling the pinch very sorely, with economically run tramp-steamers cutting them out everywhere. This is obvious now when the thrifty Norwegians are running tramp-steamers in lieu of the ramshackle old craft with which they have so long monopolized the lumber and ice trade. To a seaman the spectacle of steamers in the home ports discharging ice comes as something of a shock, for he remembers what class of vessels have always been used for this, perhaps the roughest of all the carrying trades known.
But the great work to be done is the dissemination of popular information with regard to maritime matters. To burn into the minds of our people at home what the merchant ship means to them; to make the villager understand that the cheap and abundant food, which may be purchased even in remotest inland hamlets, has been brought thus to his door from the other side of the world by the unceasing strenuous labours of seamen and the sleepless enterprise of ship-owners. I look earnestly for the day when every newspaper in the kingdom will be considered incomplete without its column of readable shipping matter--true tales of latter-day daring, of courage as high as any manifested in the attempt to destroy life in battle; when the British seaman shall no longer feel that he is as completely isolated from the thoughts and sympathies of his countrymen as if he were an inhabitant of another planet; when the British man-o'-war's man, whether he be blue-jacket or stoker, shall know of a truth that his friends at home realize what he is doing during his long absence from home: how he, for their sakes, in order that the steady stream of food-bearing ships from prolific lands far away shall never cease by day or by night through the years, keeps sleepless watch all round the world.
Let no one think that this is a small matter. The acquisition of knowledge like this is not only of the highest importance in itself, but it will bring with it a vast amount of cognate information that now is much neglected. Geography will become what it should be, a popular science, because the immense value of it will be recognized. Economical science will also assume an interest which it has long lacked for all but the minutest percentage of fairly well-educated people. Politically, such an education of the people will be of the highest value, preventing them from being led away by clap-trap and jargon, and enabling them to understand why our country has risen to its present enviable height of prosperity, and how essential it is to the well-being of every man, woman, and child in the community that the peaceful flow of over-sea traffic shall never be interrupted.