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ANAM TATA AA AL i IMI IAUUUAUILIA 4 ALUINIUIUNUUU IN \ ITAL UT NULLA. ULLAL | h | HTN A CLEVELAND APRIL, 1916 NEW YORK No. 4 Congressional Worshippers of Patronage and Politics Propose to Re-~ establish American Maritime Supremacy With a Fleet of Sixty Ships NCE MORE the administration ship purchase bill may capsize before it leaves the launching ways. Frantic efforts are being made to save it. Expert congressional shipwrights from such great ~maritime commonwealths as. Minnesota, Kentucky, “Arkansas and Texas, constituting the committee on merchant marine and fisheries, are busy shoring up the trembling cradle with strong pillars of hot air. Yet this new fledgling of the deep totters on her skids. Redfield, McAdoo and Bill Wilson, hardy mariners from the cabinet, skilled in fashioning strong words and molding subtle phrases with which to brave the storms of public criticism, have responded to the sound of the tocsin—alas, to no avail! Their weighty, double-riveted paragraphs, rushed through the presses without even a proofreading, have somehow failed to stay the careening structure. Innocent bystanders have intimated that the founda- tions of the building slip are grounded in quivering quicksand—but what does a congressional shipwright from Kentucky or Texas care about sound founda- tions, when his eyes are glued to the towering, brass- bound bulwarks of patronage? The Foreman Isn’t So Sure However, one: Joshua W. Alexander, foreman of ‘the construction gang, bronzed by long exposure on the wind-whipt waters of the mighty Missouri, seems to have certain qualms. He has even listened, now and then, for a minute or two, to the advice of mere outsiders who get. their living from the sea. We sus- pect he would like to jettison a portion of the cargo of spoils, prematurely placed in the half finished hull, but is afraid his gang will strike if he should venture a practical suggestion. What do the worshippers of the twin tin gods, Patronage and Politics, care for practical work-a-day affairs? O They live not for work that’s drab; They simply stand and gab—and grab. 123 Seeing the nation in distress, her commerce throt- tled, her defenses menaced for lack of merchant ships, these disciples of the twin tin gods propose to make a medicine. They will vote fifty million dollars out of the public treasury to buy some sixty ships—if they can get them—and turn them loose under the management of those two hardened sea merchants, Daniels and Redfield, to revolutionize the water-borne commerce of the world! Pork Makes Slippery Fingers _ This is to be the American merchant marine—the proud fleet that is to carry our flag from the Yangtze- kiang to the Rhine and from Baffin’s Land to Cape Town. Sixty ships! We need a thousand. England lost six times sixty in the first year of the war and never knew they were gone. But it is hard for fingers greasy with pork to grasp a fact. Now comes Hon. William C. Redfield, who learned some facts regarding vessel construction, metacentric height, etc., at a little investigation in Chicago last July, with the wholly novel proposal that we build steamers out of structural steel in duplicate, like skyscrapers—only the latter are built one at a time to special design, we believe. An Idea as New as the Hills We gracefully acknowledge that the idea of build- ing seagoing ships in dozen lots with interchangeable parts is an American conception. We even remember, dimly, some discussion of this novel idea, recently advanced by the secretary of commerce, as far back as the Spanish war. Our friends on the Clyde re- member it, too, and they have occasionally built ships over there in duplicate, in quadruplicate, etc. In the United States, except on the Lakes, the idea was allowed to wither because it meant simply the multiplication of those losses inherent in operating a vessel under the American flag according to the dictates of a sea-wise congress.