spirit, however great. In everyday life ordinary men require

something much more material, effective, definite and symbolic on
which to concentrate their love and their devotion. And then, what

is it, this Spirit of the Sea? It is too great and too elusive to
be embraced and taken to a human breast. All that a guileless or

guileful seaman knows of it is its hostility, its exaction of toil
as endless as its ever-renewed horizons. No. What awakens the

seaman's sense of duty, what lays that impalpable constraint upon
the strength of his manliness, what commands his not always dumb if

always dogged devotion, is not the spirit of the sea but something
that in his eyes has a body, a character, a fascination, and almost

a soul--it is his ship.
There is not a day that has passed for many centuries now without

the sun seeing scattered over all the seas groups of British men
whose material and moral existence is conditioned by their loyalty

to each other and their faithfuldevotion to a ship.
Each age has sent its contingent, not of sons (for the great mass

of seamen have always been a childless lot) but of loyal and
obscure successors taking up the modest but spiritualinheritance

of a hard life and simple duties; of duties so simple that nothing
ever could shake the traditional" target="_blank" title="a.传统的，习惯的">traditional attitude born from the physical

conditions of the service. It was always the ship, bound on any
possible errand in the service of the nation, that has been the

stage for the exercise of seamen's primitive virtues. The dimness
of great distances and the obscurity of lives protected them from

the nation's admiring gaze. Those scattered distant ships'
companies seemed to the eyes of the earth only one degree removed

(on the right side, I suppose) from the other strange monsters of
the deep. If spoken of at all they were spoken of in tones of

half-contemptuous indulgence. A good many years ago it was my lot
to write about one of those ships' companies on a certain sea,

under certain circumstances, in a book of no particular length.
That small group of men whom I tried to limn with loving care, but

sparing none of their weaknesses, was characterised by a friendly
reviewer as a lot of engaging ruffians. This gave me some food for

thought. Was it, then, in that guise that they appeared through
the mists of the sea, distant, perplexed, and simple-minded? And

what on earth is an "engaging ruffian"? He must be a creature of
literary imagination, I thought, for the two words don't match in

my personal experience. It has happened to me to meet a few
ruffians here and there, but I never found one of them "engaging."

I consoled myself, however, by the reflection that the friendly
reviewer must have been talking like a parrot, which so often seems

to understand what it says.
Yes, in the mists of the sea, and in their remoteness from the rest

of the race, the shapes of those men appeared distorted, uncouth
and faint--so faint as to be almost visible" target="_blank" title="a.看不见的；无形的">invisible. It needed the lurid

light of the engines of war to bring them out into full view, very
simple, without worldly graces, organised now into a body of

workers by the genius of one of themselves, who gave them a place
and a voice in the social scheme; but in the main still apart in

their homeless, childless generations, scattered in loyal groups
over all the seas, giving faithful care to their ships and serving

the nation, which, since they are seamen, can give them no reward
but the supreme "Well Done."

TRADITION--1918
"Work is the law. Like iron that lying idle degenerates into a

mass of useless rust, like water that in an unruffled pool sickens
into a stagnant and corrupt state, so without action the spirit of

men turns to a dead thing, loses its force, ceases prompting us to
leave some trace of ourselves on this earth." The sense of the

above lines does not belong to me. It may be found in the note-
books of one of the greatest artists that ever lived, Leonardo da

Vinci. It has a simplicity and a truth which no amount of subtle
comment can destroy.

The Master who had meditated so deeply on the rebirth of arts and
sciences, on the inward beauty of all things,--ships' lines,

women's faces--and on the visible aspects of nature was profoundly
right in his pronouncement on the work that is done on the earth.

From the hard work of men are born the sympatheticconsciousness of
a common destiny, the fidelity to right practice which makes great

craftsmen, the sense of right conduct which we may call honour, the
devotion to our calling and the idealism which is not a misty,

winged angel without eyes, but a divine figure of terrestrial
aspect with a clear glance and with its feet resting firmly on the

earth on which it was born.
And work will overcome all evil, except ignorance, which is the

condition of humanity and, like the ambient air, fills the space
between the various sorts and conditions of men, which breeds

hatred, fear, and contempt between the masses of mankind, and puts
on men's lips, on their innocent lips, words that are thoughtless

and vain.
Thoughtless, for instance, were the words that (in all innocence, I

believe) came on the lips of a prominentstatesman making in the
House of Commons an eulogistic reference to the British Merchant

Service. In this name I include men of diversestatus and origin,
who live on and by the sea, by it exclusively, outside all

professional pretensions and social formulas, men for whom not only
their daily bread but their collectivecharacter, their personal

achievement and their individual merit come from the sea. Those
words of the statesman were meant kindly; but, after all, this is

not a complete excuse. Rightly or wrongly, we expect from a man of
national importance a larger and at the same time a more scrupulous

precision of speech, for it is possible that it may go echoing down
the ages. His words were:

"It is right when thinking of the Navy not to forget the men of the
Merchant Service, who have shown--and it is more surprising because

they have had no traditions towards it--courage as great," etc.,
etc.

And then he went on talking of the execution of Captain Fryatt, an
event of undying memory, but less connected with the permanent,

unchangeable conditions of sea service than with the wrong view
German minds delight in taking of Englishmen's psychology. The

enemy, he said, meant by this atrocity to frighten our sailors away
from the sea.

"What has happened?" he goes on to ask. "Never at any time in
peace have sailors stayed so short a time ashore or shown such a

readiness to step again into a ship."
Which means, in other words, that they answered to the call. I

should like to know at what time of history the English Merchant
Service, the great body of merchant seamen, had failed to answer

the call. Noticed or unnoticed, ignored or commanded, they have
answered invariably the call to do their work, the very conditions

of which made them what they are. They have always served the
nation's needs through their own invariable fidelity to the demands

of their special life; but with the development and complexity of
material civilisation they grew less prominent to the nation's eye

among all the vast schemes of national industry. Never was the
need greater and the call to the services more urgent than to-day.

And those inconspicuous workers on whose qualities depends so much
of the national welfare have answered it without dismay, facing

risk without glory, in the perfect faithfulness to that tradition
which the speech of the statesman denies to them at the very moment

when he thinks fit to praise their courage . . . and mention his
surprise!

The hour of opportunity has struck--not for the first time--for the
Merchant Service; and if I associate myself with all my heart in

the admiration and the praise which is the greatest reward of brave
men I must be excused from joining in any sentiment of surprise.

It is perhaps because I have not been born to the inheritance of
that tradition, which has yet fashioned the fundamental part of my

character in my young days, that I am so consciously aware of it
and venture to vindicate its existence in this outspoken manner.

Merchant seamen have always been what they are now, from their
earliest days, before the Royal Navy had been fashioned out of the

material they furnished for the hands of kings and statesmen.
Their work has made them, as work undertaken with single-minded

devotion makes men, giving to their achievements that vitality and