ferred upon them. I have alluded to some of the great facts upon a knowledge of which our healthy existence depends. It is in vain that the Legislature enacts a plan upon which houses shall be built to ensure ventilation, unless the inhabitants of those houses understand the worth of fresh air. In vain is fresh water brought to our doors, if, in our indolence and ignorance, we refuse to use it. There must be intelligence both in the legislator and those for whom he legislates, if we are to take advantage of our present knowledge of the laws of life to secure us from disease and death.

When one sees how little is the effort made to introduce into our general system of education a knowledge of those great laws of physics, chemistry, and physiology, on which our life depends, one is filled with dismay at the prospect before us. When the leading educationists in our country are carrying on a controversy as to whether in our examinations the highest rates of marks shall be given to classics, mathematics, history, or modern languages, one feels that they are quarrelling over dry bones, and forgetting all that which gives life and reality to our existence. It is not till the great facts of the natural sciences shall take a proper position in the studies of our universities, where the majority of our statesmen are instructed, that we can expect them to be taught in the middle class schools, where our vestrymen gain the elements of their education. It is only when those who instruct weekly in our pulpits, and influence the education of our lower class schools, are themselves taught the great laws by which the Creator governs the life of the world, that we can expect our working classes to exercise that judgment and self-control with regard to their health, the want of which causes the sacrifice of holocausts of victims amongst them every year.

When I consider the sacredness of human life, when I know how sacred we all regard it, I feel as if it were a bathos which I ought to avoid, to remind you how costly a thing is disease and death. But it is true the gain of 100,000 lives annually would pay ten times over the cost of all the exertions that would arise to secure them for life and for their country. But I will not pursue the subject. I leave now the question of the public health in your hands, to work out its great problems, as amongst the most patriotic and the noblest to which the human mind can be devoted.

IN the address I was called upon to give in London, in the interval since our meeting at York, I endeavoured to develope the more prominent defects of our chief means of internal communication - namely, those by railways; and the consideration of the subject then, served to promote the appointment of a Royal Commission to examine it, with a view to legislative remedies. On the present occasion, I have to call attention chiefly to the large losses of lives and property by shipwreck, and to growing conditions of insecurity in our system of external communication, by our increasing mercantile marine; which also appear to me to demand responsible inquiry. Recent cases in our criminal courts, displaying systematised murders and systematised incendiarism, together with the systematised destruction of ships, and frauds,-all for insurance money, all apparently arising from common defects in the principles of our legislation, and from the unguarded manner in which extensive insurance business is conducted, so as to offer temptations to crime, and occasion great public waste, make it a matter of conscience with me to endeavour to direct attention to these topics collectively, with a view to measures of prevention, on the basis of a common principle.

And first, as to the extent of the evil of shipwreck. The vessels totally lost during the last year of the returns recently published were 569. The average for the last five years has been 558 totally lost, and 930 wrecked or subjected to partial loss, being an annual average total of 1,488 casualties, involving an annual loss of 875 lives; and that, notwithstanding the exertions of life-boats, and various voluntary means of saving life, by which, in 1862, more than 4,000 lives, and, in 1863,

more than 5,000 lives, were saved from destruction in the occurrence of shipwrecks.

It may serve to give a conception of the evils under consideration, if I state that the whole of the fleet which Queen Elizabeth mustered to meet the Spanish Armada numbered 176 ships, of which 34 only were "ships royal;" so that next year, and each year after, if no alteration be made in our system, we must anticipate that there is doomed to be totally lost more than three times the number of the English fleet in that great contest, and to be partially damaged and wrecked nearly eight times that fleet-occasioning a loss and damage of a tonnage of upwards of 300,000; or upwards of five times the tonnage of all Cromwell's fleet, with which, under Blake, he kept Christendom in awe. Why! the annual loss of lives by shipwreck now approaches to the annual average of the whole of the killed outright in battle, by sea as well as by land, which only amounted to 899 during the last twenty-two years of war. I might treat this sacrifice of life as a great waste, too, for each sailor may be considered as an investment of £250 on the average. And the evil goes on increasing. The average general loss upon British shipping was, according to a paper by Mr. Lance, of Lloyd's, in 1816-17 and '18, 1:57 per cent.; in 1850, it was 2.806 per cent.; in 1855, I make it out to have been nearly 4 per cent.; and in 1863, according to the last wreck returns, nearly 6 per cent. of the entire mercantile marine.

In 1839, it was my duty, with my colleagues of the Constabulary Force Commission-a police commission of inquiry-to investigate the causes of crime, with a view to its repression by the agency of a police. We found along the coast a regular practice of plundering wrecks, and a state of disorder befitting only a barbarous country. I visited Cheshire, and some parts of the coast where the practice of wrecking was the most rife and regular. But what were the elements that caused this regular occurrence of wrecks from year to year, in the like weather and at the same points, as continued to be shown by wreck charts? On inquiry into the character of the wrecks themselves, a large proportion of them were proved to be the result. of gross ignorance, and preventable. They were due mostly to ignorant commands, inferior hands, and bad seamanship. But to what was due this large proportion of loss from bad seamanship, in this great maritime country? Indifference to the use of skill, was the common answer, in the terms of the following from Captain Alderley Sleigh, of the mercantile marine.

He, in common with other maritime witnesses at the ports, alleged:-"Not only is there no interest in getting good, but there is a fearful effect in going shorthanded. Merchant vessels are shamefully inadequately manned. I once came to England in a brig which could only afford two hands to each watch. The man at the helm was frequently obliged to leave his post to let go the ropes in a squall at night. In one case the vessel was almost lost, from this circumstance, off Cape St. Vincent. In a moderate gale it was necessary to cut away from the yard a foretopsail which could not be fronted from her, having only three men and two boys in a ship of 250 tons."

"If the lives of the men are lost, does the widowhood or orphanage or any such loss fall on the owners?" "No, on the contrary, the owners frequently gain. In case of the loss of the vessel there is no claim for wages, and the parish supports the widow and the orphans, if the man happen to be married." "Are the losses ascribable to ignorance, and are those losses very great?

"Yes. I believe it has been ascertained, beyond contradiction, that the number of British ships which are lost is more than one in twenty-four; and that property to the value of nearly £3,000,000 annually is thus lost to the nation. Chiefly through ignorance and the present system of nautical insurance, which assures any ship on good premium, however unsafe or decayed. Further, that for every seventeen sailors who die, twelve are drowned, or lost by shipwreck. And that nearly 2,000 perish annually in the deep. Thus hundreds of widows and thousands of children are thrown on the precarious charity of the public." This was some years ago, and I cannot now answer for the accuracy of the statistics; nor is it material, since the present positive losses are so immense. In a paper by Mr. Henry Jeula, an underwriter of Lloyd's, on some statistics relating to shipping casualties, read last year at the Statistical Society, he made the following large and pregnant observations, as coming from a member of that body, "On the Terrible Increase in Casualties":

"It may not be unimportant to ask the question, whether, with the enormous increase of our ships both in number and tonnage, and a higher ratio of activity, the very large reduction in the percentage of hands employed to each hundred tonsnotwithstanding the admitted advantages of patent capstans, windlasses, reefing topsails, and other mechanical appliancesmay not have a close relation to the terrible increase in casualties which has occurred while examinations' and certificates' of 'service' and 'competency' might reasonably have led us to hope for a decrease in the number of disasters?"

I am assured that never before now were a larger number of vessels of the mercantile marine so short-handed, which leads to short watches, and in cases of exigency leaves less power for prompt and vigorous action. But why are any sent out in so dangerous a condition? The answer is still the same-impunity given by full insurance.

That which was patent to us then, as so represented, remains uncorrected now;-namely, the strong negative motives against progress,-against exertion for the attainment of knowledge and skill-constituted by the unguarded practice of insurance against the losses consequent on ignorance.

It is alleged now, as it was then, first, that vessels are sent out to sea, which the owners would not send out, if they were not insured, if the owners were compelled to be their own insurers, -and secondly, that crews are sent out under masters whom the owners would not entrust with lives or property if they were sufficiently responsible for them. There have been examinations provided for masters, which are good as far as they go. But, though I have been a strong advocate for examinations, which serve as screens to keep out absolute ignorance, I have never pretended that they were, in themselves, complete securities for competency. The man who may keep his head in an examination room, especially in a mere pass examination, may lose his head in a storm. It appears, however, that of the vessels lost during the last year of the return of the ships of the home and coasting trade that were wrecked, whilst 844 were commanded by masters not having certificates of competency, only 141 were commanded by masters who had such certificates;-that is to say,—that whilst about three out of four of the masters have passed an examination, about five out of six of the vessels wrecked had been entrusted to men who had obtained no certificates of competency whatsoever.

It were a dreary prospect, if such a succession and increasing annual amount of the horrors of shipwreck, as these wreck returns display, were inevitable, and were an unavoidable condition of our increasing commerce and means of external communication. The public naturally ask, as we have seen that even a member of Lloyd's asks, how, with the progress of science, there should be an increase of these casualties? The evidence of the extent to which they are found to arise from ignorance or remissness is really a relief for the future, for to the extent of that remissness the evils are remediable, by the application of sound principles of legislation. Now, to me, the evidence, a portion only of which I can now submit, appears to be clear and decisive that in the greater proportion of cases the evils are preventable. To take the