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sirous of relieving the country from the embarrassing, undignified, and dan- gerous position which it occupies in relation to ships. The situation is really an uncomfortable one. In case of conflict, say between England and Germany, it would be practically im- possible for us to take care of our foreign trade, and as we must depend upon the marketing of our surplus abroad in order to keep our factories at their full output, any disturbance of over-sea transportation wou!d in- evitably result in the stagnation of in- dustry at home. A maritime country --and the United States is certainly a maritime country, since it has the largest navigable coast line in the world--should be self-contained in its shipping and ship building. The Uni- ted States is not. It is the- opinion: even of economists that a nation should carry one-half of its foreign trade. We-are therefore: entitled to 50 per cent and we have but 12. DEPLORE' FAILURE OF SHIPPING BILL. I deplore the failure of the shipping bil not alone on commercial grounds, but for patriotic reasons. The mer- chant marine is the cradle of the navy. There is no way' of getting competent men to man our _ battle- ships except from the merchant ma- rine. The constant complaint of the navy department is that it cannot get men "to man its' ships. The govern- -ment can build them out. of its inex- haustible resources, for that is simply a matter of money; but the matter of men is another question. Being a maritime nation we should not permit the sea habit to die. out of our peo- ple. I believe in the creation of an adequate naval reserve among the men of our merchant marine service. The- day will come when we will need them. There is no doubt in my mind, but that the .overwhelming disaster which overtook the Russian fleet in its contest with Japan was due to the fact that the ships were practically handled by landsmen. No nation with an over-sea commerce can afford to neglect its ships. Whatever handi- caps there are to their successful op- eration should be removed. We may as well look facts in the face. The handicap to the successful operation of the American ship is the protective tariff. Secretary Root in his great speech before the trans-Mississippi commercial congress courageously de- clared that the American ship was suf- fering from an artificial handicap and that it should be removed by artificial means. What he meant by that was that the tariff had made it impossib!e to construct a ship in the United 'thing worth holding. THE MarRINE. REVIEW States as cheaply as it can be con- structed abroad, and that this condi- tion, created by the - government, should be compensated by the gov: erlment. COASTWISE LAW IN DANGER. Eternal vigilance is the price of lib- erty. It is as well the price of every- Certain events of late have cast ominous shadows be- fore them. The bulwark of the Amer- ican merchant marine today is its 'coastwise laws, and yet at this very minute twenty-one British steame:s are on their way from Glasgow to carry, coal "Irom Noriolk, "Va. to. San Francisco, Cal. for the' tse. of the American navy. Attorney General Bonaparte has held that this is not an evasion of the coastwise laws. The fact remains that foreign ships are car- rying American coal from one Amer- ican port to another American port. The fact remains also that they have been chartered by' the navy depart- ment to carry this coal because they can cafry it cheaper than American ships. _Why should they not carry it cheaper? The ships cost less to build and are costing less to operate. These are the two things that influence the freight rate: The navy department has done a thing that no American citizen would be permitted to do, and it has been upheld by the attorney general of the United States. The attorney general's opinion, however, is most vigorously assailed by counsel prob- 'ably aS eminent, and for my part I cannot understand why laws which have been held inviolate for ninety years should now be violated with the sanction of the general government, unless it is the forerunner of a gen- _eral raid upon the integrity of these laws. In my opinion the coastwise law of the United States is in danger and it behooves American ship build- ers to organize to prevent any further encroachment upon it. PROTECTION ON THE LAKES. Here on the lakes nature has given us an additional protection for which we cannot be too thankful--the falls of Niagara and the rapids of the St. Lawrence--and these with the naviga- tion laws have kept out of our waters the hungry British tramp steamers and allowed us to build for ourselves a mercantile fleet which, in its adapta- bility to the business and suitability to the trade which it carries on, is second to none in the world. The cost of transporting a ton of freight a mile by rail in this country averages about 734 mills. By water on the great lakes it is only 92 of a 25 mill, or about one-eighth as much. By the present Erie canal it is nearly two mills and on the lower Mississippi one mill. Yet notwithstanding these fig- ures, the uncertainty of navigation on the Mississippi, from St. Louis down, is so great that the amount of ton- nage engaged has steadily decreased from 2,000,000 in 1880 to only about 600,000 at the present time. Hun- dreds of miliions of dollars would be saved by the substitution of water trans- portation between the central west and the seashore. Practical railroad men declare that the further lowering of. railroad rates is impracticable. Dur- ing the last decade, the internal com- merce of the United States has im- creased 100 per cent, while the facili- ties of the railroads have inczeased only 25 per cent and are now practi- cally at a standstill. Mr. Hill has de- clared that the cost of constructing railroads to meet the immediate re- quirements of the country would be © five thousand millions, and this takes no account of the future. Consideration of these matters has resulted in the present movement for a great inland waterway system from the lakes to the gulf and for the-en- largement of the Erie canal on which the state of New York is now spend- ing $100,000,000. The internal com- merce of the: country iS sectire. Whether the seaboard is reached on the Gulf or Atlantic, through Chicago or through Buffalo, the first 'part of the journey must be through the great lakes, and the tonnage seeking trans- portation over these inland seas is in- creasing by leaps and bounds. From the iron ranges of Michigan and Min- nesota, 41,000,000 tons of ore will come down this year to the furnaces 'of the lower lakes. From the rich prairies of the great northwest, a gold- en flood of 200,000,000 bushels of grain pours over these waters to the east. In the opposite direction, from the mines in Ohio and Pennsylvania, 20,- 000,000 tons of coal is carried north- ward and westward for fuel. GROWTH OF LAKE COMMERCE. Twenty years ago when I first came to the lake country for the season of 1887 there was only 8,000,000 tons of ore, 3,000,000 tons of coal and 50,000,- 000 bushels of grain transported. For that year the total lake feet -com- prised 727,234 tons, all except forty- two being of wood, and only three of the bulk freighters reaching a gross tonnage of 2,500. The total move- ment of freight on the lakes for that year was 5,494,649 tons. The total movement last year -was 63,808,571 tons and for this season will doubt-