3. Only two of these houses have a legal existence; all the rest are kept open in defiance of a State law, enacted in 1866, 'for the better protection of the seamen,' whom these landsharks prey upon. A grand jury was obtained which indicted the delinquents, who refused to take out a license according to this law, but the State Commissioners have in vain urged the City attorney to prosecute the offenders.
4. The landlords laugh at the authority of the State Commissioners for licensing boarding houses for seamen, of which Mr. E. W. Chester is President, and rely on the license to vend liquor issued by the Police Board, of which Mr. Acton is President, as their ample protection.
5. The landlords have congregated mainly in the Fourth and Sixth Wards of the city, in order to influence, if not control them politically. The combination existing between boarding-house keepers and shipping- masters enables them to cast, in any election in the City, at least one thousand votes, and probably more.
6. Much of the smuggling in this port is done by the runners of these houses.
7. Numbers of criminals flying from justice are aided to get to sea by these men; and during the war hundreds of deserters from the army, who had never been out of sight of land, and knew nothing of an ordinary seaman's duty, were shipped by them as good seamen.
8. No inquiry is made by owners, captains, or shipping agents, into the moral character or seamanship of the men employed by these agents.
9. Seamen are allowed to ship only when penniless, and often without sufficient clothing to protect them from the inclement weather.
10. They are discharged from ships without the wages due them, and have no alternative but to go to the men whom they know will rob them; and the United States laws authorize the owners of vessels to deny them their pay until ten days after the cargo is discharged—much longer than the owners usually withhold it. It is these laws which throw the sailor under the control of the 'land sharks.'
11. Foreign sailors are induced to desert their ships and go in other vessels by landlords who aim to rob them of the advance pay which custom exacts. The sailors thus not only lose by desertion the pay due them by the ship they abandon, as well as the advance which, they get from their new commander, but also forfeit their nationality and the protection of their former flag.
12. Foreign captains frequently force their men to desert them, in order to save their keep and back pay. This they accomplish either by bad treatment of the men or collusion with the landlords.