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18 MARINE REVIEW. [July 10 CONCERNING SHIPS, SHIPPING COMBINES AND SUBSIDIES. Glasgow, June 28.--The gossip about shipping combines continues fast and furious--in the columns of certain newspapers. Scarcely a line exists which has not been "combined" by some paragraphist with some other line. Sir Christopher Furness, who has become a sort of Britannic Pierpont Morgan in the minds of some sensation lovers, is almost daily credited with some extraordinary deal. If he has even contemplated one- half of the things he is said to have achieved he must be able to buy up and pigeonhole the entire outfit of J. P. Morgan & Coe ME Morgan is going to run the British crown we shall hear of Sir Christopher Fur- ness setting up his head office in the white house, and of sir Thomas Lipton building a pork palace in Chicago as boss of a world's food trust. It is all very amusing, but it is not sense. American readers should take with a good many grains of salt the stories that are current about ship- ping deals in progress on this side. As a rule they emanate from evening newspapers, which know rather less about ships and shipping than they do about Sanskrit, and who swallow as gospel (and headline) any sort of rousing yarn that any sad-faced joker in the shipping world maliciously chooses to spin for them. By-and-by perhaps we shall be told some fine day (with extra sized headlines) that Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan is a myth, and that the American shipping combine has really been organized and will be managed by the emperor of China as a preparatory move £1 10s. was paid. The insurance account amounted at the end of Decem- ber, 1900, to £250,000. A row in the camp, however, has delayed matters and there is a movement to turn out the present directors and elect a completely new board, which may alter the complexion of affairs. INQUIRY REGARDING SHIPPING SUBSIDIES. The trade between the Clyde and South Africa has been growing to such an extent that the fleet of steamers engaged in the traffic has been nearly doubled within the past few months. The Clan line used to have almost a monopoly of this trade, but a couple of months ago the Ellerman- Harrison line supplemented the sailings to the Cape, and now this service is busy and prosperous. The Anchor line 1s about to start a service of its own. A couple of Clan liners left Glasgow the other day for South Africa with heavy cargoes of general merchandise. These were the Clan Mathieson for Algoa bay, and the Clan Macleod for Natal. The Clan Cumming has come in to load for South Africa. _The stream of emigrants from British ports to the Cape is steadily increasing. The Clan and Eller- man-Harrison lines are now working in unison with the Union, Castle and Bucknall lines. a - The select committee of the house of commons on shipping subsidies lately examined Mr, Edward Dodshon. This gentleman has had about THE STEAMSHIP PARRAN IN THE NEW DRY DOCK OF THE HAVANA DRY DOCK CO., HAVANA, CUBA. towards the Chinese invasion of the western world. Meanwhile, I find from an advance proof of Lloyds' annual statistics of the world's shipping, which will not be issued to the public until next month, that at the pres- ent time the world's merchant shipping consists of 17,156 steamers aggre- gating 25,859,987 tons gross and 12,472 sailers aggregating 6,577,776 tons-- in all, 29,628 vessels and 32,437,763 tons. And of that vast tonnage 11,041 vessels and 15,546,897 tons are under the British flag, while 3,337,156 tons are American, 3,138,568 German, 1,632,757 tons Norwegian, 1,519,922 tons French, 1,159,082 tons Italian; all the other nations have under 1,000,000 tons each. Before such figures I don't think we need feel scary. Among the numerous projects spoken of is one for an alliance be- tween the Royal Mail Co. and other lines in the West India and South America trades. The Royal Mail Steam Packet 'Co. has issued a circular to shareholders notifying that since the last annual general meeting pre- liminary negotiations have commenced by which the operations of the company would be greatly developed and extended by association with other important British lines. The details are at present kept private but will be disclosed to the proprietors for their approval before anything definite is decided on. The Royal Mail Steam Packet Co. was éstablished in 1839 by royal charter, and supplementary charters were obtained in 1852 and 1882. The subscribed capital is £1,500,000 in shares of £100, of which £900,000, or £60 per share, has been paid up, in addition to £350,000 of debentures. Dividends of £3 were paid in 1891, 1892 and 1893; £2 10s. in 1894 and £3 in each of the six years to 1900. For the first half of 1901 thirty-five years' experience of shipping traffic with the Levant and con. tinental ports. He has made a special study of the German through preferential tariffs, which, he said, were absolutely different from any other tariffs in the world. They combined rail and ship carriage in one rate, practically fixed by the government. There was no very distinct means of distinguishing the rail from the ship carriage, because the government made a secret of the matter. It was obvious that the shipping interest benefited at the expense of the railway, for the railway rates were cheaper than any in Europe. A sum was subtracted from the railway rate and given to the shipping rate, this being possible owing to the government having the control of the railway undertakings. The probable reason for the German government keeping secret the proportions was that if the lowness of the railway proportion became known everybody would claim the preference, whether the goods were designed for shipment or not. In practice the thing worked out in this way, that goods going to the Levant were carried from Berlin to Hamburg much cheaper than goods merely going from Berlin to Hamburg. It is an export tariff, and nothing more, designed to encourage the export of German manufactures. Mr. Dod- shon handed to the committee a series of tables. One of these 'showed that the highest amount falling to the railway was considerably less than one halfpenny per ton per mile for anything, and for most things be- tween one-fourth to one-third of a penny per ton per mile. Roughly speaking the railway rate in Germany for goods going to the Levant was less than half the ordinary inland charge, and for goods going to East