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-- © MARINE heavy repairs or alterations that require to be done at a shi rd i United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, including ee = engining, and such like. Nothing herein contained, however, shall 'pre- vent the purchasers from placing orders for new steamers or heavy repairs or alterations, reboilering or re-engining at ship yards in the United States. The builders shall and do undertake to carry out all such orders to the full capacity of their ship yards and workshops, except as regards the Hamburg-Americanische Packetfahrt Actien Gesellschaft's contract provided for in the following clause: "The builders shall and do undertake not to build for any other ship owners than the parties hereto, provided orders from the purchasers suffice to keep the said builders' works fully and continuously employed and in any case the builders are not to accept orders from parties who are competitors of the purchasers in any trade at the time carried on by them without first obtaining the purchasers' consent; but this proviso is not to prevent the builders accepting orders from the Hamburg-Ameri- canische Packetfahrt Actien Gesellschaft. "The commission terms on which the work shall be carried out are to be as follows: The cost to the purchasers to be-- "The cost as shown by the builders' books, including wages, materi- als, direct expenses, and a due proportion of fixed expenses and estab- lishment charges. "A commission on the whole as the builders' profit, said commission in the case of new ships and their machinery to be reckoned at 5 per cent, on new boilers and on engines for other than new ships, 10 per ° cent, and on repairs, renewais, alterations and shipwork in connection 'with reboilering and re-engining, 15 per cent. "Payment is to be made by the purchasers as required by the builders on the basis of cash against expenditure during the progress of the work, and the ascertained balance on completion, and interest at 5 per cent per annum to be allowed on expenditure in advance of payment or payments in advance of expenditure, as the case may be, but no large balances to stand over except by mutual arrangement. "Nothing in this agreement shall prevent the purchasers from build- ing, repairing or altering, reboilering or re-engining in other ship yards should the builders be unable to undertake it within reasonable time. This arrangement to be for ten years from the date hereof and termina- ble at the expiration thereof or after by five years' notice by either party." So it would seem that Mr. Pirrie of the firm of Harland & Wolff, who negotiated the sale of the White Star line to the combination, has -- secured for himself a very valuable contract. PEN SKETCH OF THE RT. HON. W. J. PIRRIE. Mr. Curtis Brown of London contributes to the American newspapers the following sketch of Mr. W. J. Pirrie of the ship building firm of Har- land & Wolff, Belfast, Ireland: The Rt. Hon. W. J. Pirrie was a millionaire before he put the White Star line into the Morgan group, and unless all reports as to the value received are erroneous, his wealth was enormously increased by the deal. Before Morgan got the Leyland line, Pirrie was the biggest man on the Atlantic, so to speak, and even now, after surrendering control of the White Star line, he remains probably the greatest shipping power in Eng- _land and the greatest ship builder in the world. The fact that this British partner in the Morgan deal was born poor is offset by the fact that he was born.in America. His father died in Quebec when the boy was a year old, | and his mother took him back to Ireland, whence the family had come. One day, at the age of fifteen, he turned up at the offices of Harland & Wolff, then a comparatively small ship building firm in Belfast, and went to work as a draughtsman for next to nothing a week. That was a great day for him, and a great day for Harland & Wolff, although it seems to have been some time before the firm realized that they had taken on a re- markable sort of a boy. : Those who know the Pirrie of today say that he is wonderfully like Pierpont Morgan in all of the things that count for the making of the sort of a man you can't hold down, but he had to travel upward step by step without much general education, without friends who could help him and without finding much promise in the future for reaching as good a place as Morgan had to start with in his father's banking house after a finishing educational polish at Heidelberg. Pirrie's only advantages over the other young fellows in the Belfast ship yard were an uncommonly hard head, a knack of seeing what was wanted before anyone else did and grit enough to do it without figuring too closely how much there was in it for him. In twelve years he had climbed up through all the subordinate positions to that of manager, and at the age of twenty-seven was taken into the firm. Presently both Harland and Wolff roamed away to the house of commons and left the youngest partner to run the business pretty much as he pleased. It had grown to be an important firm before Pirrie came into It, but it spread out over the banks of the river Lagan afterward in marvelous fashion, and finally captured and kept the world's record for annual output. It launched nearly 100,000 tons last year, almost a quarter as much as the total tonnage of American steamers engaged in foreign trade. It has 10,000 people on the pay-roll and the works sprawl out over 100 acres. These works have a good deal of American interest Just now, because whether or not the British nation at large lost its grip on the Atlantic through the steamship combine, it is now an open secret that Pirrie gained alot for his ship yards and that a goodly proportion, at least, of the huge racers the combine is going to build will come from these Harland & Wolff yards. . ty Although the Belfast ship builder is generally supposed to be the second biggest man in the new combination, and although he has just brought off the most successful stroke he ever made, it does not ye me that in general he owes much to the kind of luck that tumbled faite Beit into the Kimberley diamond fields at just the right moment founding the greatest fortune in Europe. He admits though that he '3 have one glorious bit of luck when he married Mrs. Pirrie. That brought a turning point in his career--or maybe it would be more accurate to say that it kept his career from having a turning point. He had _ been poe sessed of a notion that British politics offered the best goal for him. - Pirrie knew better and argued him out of the idea. _He now says gal- -lantly that he owes whatever. success, he has had to his wife. She --? _to have given him a little political leeway, however, for, he put.into ni adcal affairs in Belfast the same. indomitable energy that he put into ore building. He became _a sort of father of the city, to whose importance REVIEW. 21 : ---------- firm had been the chief contributor. He was made lord mayor, and got to the pinnacle of British social ambition by entertaining royalty on sev- eral occasions. Mrs. Pirrie left her impress on the city likewise by rais- ing $500,000. to found the Royal Victoria hospital and by getting a big endowment for it. His services were recognized by the government, too, and he was made a member of the privy council--which makes a man right honorable, but does not do much else for him. _ Mr, Pirrie became one of the largest stockholders in the White Star line through having built all their ships. The Oceanic, in particular, was his personal pride and joy. The Celtic, the biggest ship afloat, was also specially designed by him. It is a queer fact that his firm built something like $40,000,000 worth of White Star ships without ever having a contract. Today the greatest Atlantic line and the greatest ship yard are so closely allied that you can hardly tell which from t'other. They say over here that it was Pirrie quite as much as Morgan who cooked up the White Star deal, and my informant implies, although he refuses to go into par- ticulars, that the public would be somewhat astonished if it knew how brief and informal were the negotiations between the two financiers. Brit- ish papers have been howling for weeks about the disaster which, they say, has overtaken British shipping, but the Pirrie view of the deal is that it is a little private dicker that he and Mr. Morgan happened to make one day, and that isn't going to hurt the nation a particle. He does not even think that the combination will result in an increase of passenger fares. The predominant British partner in the combine--or conspiracy, as they have a tendency to call it in the house of commons--celebrates his fifty-fifth birthday at the end of this month, and is therefore just ten years younger than Morgan. Like his American co-laborer, he is not a "pretty" man, is not much given to wasting time or words, and gets more fun out of business than out of anything else in life. He has a taste for the unos- tentatious sort of charity, and makes a tour of the poorest quarters in Belfast every Christmas in the role of Santa Claus. He is more punctual and methodical than the average clock, and until lately used to put in eight hours' hard work every day at his office. One or two visits which he had paid to the United States convinced him that the American system of keeping in close personal touch with the workman was preferable to being an inaccessible and remote sort of divinity. A member of parliament who knows him well tells me that on returning from one of these visits across the Atlantic Mr. Pirrie called his employes together, and said that if any of them should ever have a grievance he wanted to have it brought before him personally. He promised that no man should be discharged without having a chance to appeal. One reason for the rise of the Harland & Wolff yards and for the suc- cess of the White Star ships was that the managing partner knew every last detail of the work himself. Just before joining the firm he made tours' all over the world, studying minutely the needs of traffic. Then he went back and turned out the Britannic and Germanic, which were as great a marvel in their day as the Deutschland, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse and Oceanic are now. They beat everything afloat and got better as they grew older. Although she .is thirty years old now, and has outlived nearly all her contemporaries, the Germanic actually beat all her records not long ago, and is still traveling from New York to Liverpool in better time than half the passenger steamers that cross the ocean. Mr. Pirrie doesn't share the views occasionally expressed over here that ocean speed has reached its highest economical point, but, with characteristic caution, he cannot be persuaded to venture into prophecy concerning the number of days it will take to get across the ocean a generation hence or how much it will cost. He thinks there is not a business in the world that is going to offer a better chance for young men than that of ship building, especially in the engineering branch. OPPOSED TO SUBMARINES. In a hearing before the house naval committee this week Rear- Admiral George W. Melville, engineer-in-chief of the navy, strongly opposed the construction of submarine boats. He said the development of submarine boats is in its infancy and that the Holland is only a scien- tific toy, basing his opinion, he said, on a close theoretical study he had given to the subject. He related his experience with Mr. Holland, the inventor of the boat, and with the first one planned, the Plunger. "I had no idea then that the boat ever would be a success," he 'said. "but congress had appropriated $150,000 for the experiment and there was nothing left for the navy department to do but to spend the money." The admiral said he had expressed his views very forcibly on this subject a year and a half ago to the committee and had no reason to change his opinion given at that time, that submarine boats are not successful nor a necessary equipment of the navy. Rear-Admiral F. T. Bowles, chief naval constructor, explained to the committee that he had given the subject of submarine boats careful con- sideration, although they never had come before him for personal investi- gation. He has had very little experience with them, but is familiar with their principles. .He said he thought the boats are markedly deficient in . speed and, according to reports, inferior to foreign boats. Capt. Charles D. Sigsbee, chief intelligence officer of the navy depart- ment and a member of the board of construction, did not agree in his testimony with Admiral Melville as to the moral value of a submarine boat. 'Its moral influence is something tremendous," he said, "especially when you consider that such a boat can make an attack at any time and the enemy is powerless to prevent it." Capt. Sigsbee said that of course he spoke on the hypothesis that the boat would be perfectly equipped. The new Atlantic Transport line steamship Minnetonka arrived in New York this week from the builders' yard at Belfast. Her dimensions are: Length, 600 ft.; beam, 65 ft.; and depth, 44 ft; registered tonnage 8,616 and gross 13,398. She is fitted to carry cabin passengers only. She has twin screws, driven by separate sets of quadruple-expansion engines. She has a large cargo and dead meat capacity, and will carry a great many head of cattle and horses. The Minnetonka, which was built by Harland & Wolff, will take her place in the London and New York service, sailing ef May. 3b2. She is commanded by Capt. Sydney Layland. )\\:»- om re sania i ; bina: rigid . ogg. , novo ons The Racine Boat. Manufacturing Co., Racine, Wis,, is, negotiating' for the purchase of a new factory site on Jacob's island, near,;Kenosha.