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Entitled to Protection ie. aS SHIP YARD HE general policy of the United States is that of giving legitimate aid and encouragement to her indus- tries. A survey for the year 1930 shows that the sugar tariff cost the American people $300,000,000 for that single year. Tobacco growers were protected to the extent of $440,000,000 while cotton manu- facturers derived benefits totaling $240,000,000. The silk goods people benefited in the amount of $225,000,000, leather goods were : os boomed more than $100,000,000 and chemicals brought in the tidy sum of $120,000,000 above the unprotected price. It remained for the steel industry to eclipse all others as premier beneficiary of the nation’s tariff policy. American consumers in 1930 paid this industry more than $1,000,000,000 above the free trade price. Yet it is a remarkable thing that many Americans, who favor protection for our basic land industries, are adverse or indifferent to the extension of similar aid to our ships in foreign trade. American tariffs increase the cost of ship construction and operation through a general elevation of the price structure. Our overseas shipping has no home market. It is forced to produce according to the American standard of living and it must sell in competition with ships built and operated by low-wage countries. If protection is the acknowledged course of this nation why should the ship be left to perform its economic services overseas without protection? Surely the $20,000,000 a year now paid to American ship- ping in the form of mail contracts is not without precedent and is ridiculously small compared with the huge amounts paid by the domestic consumer to other basic industries. a te MARINE REVIEwW—September, 1934