Consequently the making of pilots was at an end.

Every year some would die and others become incapacitated by age and infirmity; there would be no new ones to take their places.

In time, the association could put wages up to any figure it chose; and as long as it should be wise enough not to carry the thing too far and provoke the national government into amending the licensing system, steamboat owners would have to submit, since there would be no help for it.
The owners and captains were the only obstruction that lay between the association and absolute power; and at last this one was removed.
Incredible as it may seem, the owners and captains deliberately did it themselves.

When the pilots' association announced, months beforehand, that on the first day of September, 1861, wages would be advanced to five hundred dollars per month, the owners and captains instantly put freights up a few cents, and explained to the farmers along the river the necessity of it, by calling their attention to the burdensome rate of wages about to be established.

It was a rather slender argument, but the farmers did not seem to detect it.