THE work of the Life-boat Service does not grow less. It is actually increasing.

In spite of all that is being done, by new inventions, to make travel by sea safer as well as more comfortable, 146 more calls were made for the help of life-boats in 1946 than ever before in a year of peace. More calls were made even than in any of the last four years of the war. The number was 631.

The number of lives which life-boats rescued was 647. That is not a record, but it has been surpassed in only three other years of peace—1907, 1898 and 1892.

So the work goes on; and those who might think, not unreasonably, that the life-boats are a service the need for which is likely to decline, are confounded by the facts. Sir William Hillary, in his appeal for a Life-boat Service in 1823, wrote: "So long as man shall continue to navigate the ocean, and the tempests shall hold their course over its surface, in every age, and on every coast, disaster by sea, shipwreck and peril to human life must inevitably take place." Had he known what stupendous ships would be built, what marvellous things would be discovered, what ingenious things invented in the next 124 years, he might well have hesitated to write those words; but he was wiser in his ignorance. What he wrote then remains true to-day..