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1901 MARINE REVIEW. a : ret with the products of American industry, upon a mission of commerce, peace, and civilization all over the world. The bill creates no favors, it fosters no interests, but it lays down universal rules by which the capital and enterprise of the people can de- mand their share of this subsidy. It is restricted to no class of vessels, but is given upon a scale adjusted after most careful consideration to every kind and every tonnage of steamship, to the sailing ships and to the fos-~ tering and encouragement of our fisheries, which are the nurseries of our seamen. Its purpose is to give to each class of vessels the amount, and only the amount, necessary to equalize the cost of construction, opera~ tion, and maintenance of that class of vessels with the cost of construc- tion, operation, and maintenance of similar ships sailing under foreign flags. Of the three principal objections raised against the bill, the first is that the existing lines will get all the money. Of the $9,000,000 per annum, the amount which the American line can earn is $1,100,000, being the sum which passed the senate in the original postal subsidy bill, but which was changed in the house. The amount which can be received by the ships of that company and all other 21-knot steamers hereafter built combined cannot exceed $2,000,000 a year. That leaves $7,000,000 for the purposes which have been so eloquently argued by my friend from Georgia (Mr. ‘Clay) for the lower-speed freight ships, Certainly the Americans who have risked their money and given their brains and experience to this badly handicapped struggle for an American merchant marine ought not to be punished for their efforts. The testimony conclusively shows that even under the present mail contracts the four fast ships of the Interna- tional Navigation Co. are run at a loss, ; THE SENATOR DISSECTS THE BILL. The next objection is to high-speed vessels. It is charged that they are not essential to the development of American trade with foreign coun- tries. It has not been the characteristic of the American people to yield to each other, much less to foreigners, on a question of speed. It is not poetry or sentiment which inspires Germany to build the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse in order to beat the record of the Majestic, and to expend three and a half million dollars to build the Deutschland to excel in speed the Campania, or which leads the most prudent of all investors, the French, to struggle so desperately to construct steamships which may equal, if not excel, the British and the German in quickness of passage across the Atlantic. In transportation speed is desired. It is the gauge by which peoples judge the maritime skill, genius and enterprise of other nations. No American has been abroad and no American has read the record of ocean voyages who has not had comfort when our little fleet “ bore the palm, or felt mortified and annoyed when this little spark of maritime life was extinguished by superior enterprise and ambition among Germans or English. England, Germany and France have their own rea- son for giving large subsidies for these great ocean greyhounds. It is that they may have them for auxiliary war ships in time of war. The next objection is that the bill does not give sufficient encourage- ment to the tramp steamer; in other words, to the slow or 10-knot or 11- knot steamship. Figures show that the excess of compensation under this bill to the 10-knot or 11-knot steamship over the cost of operation and maintenance is greater than for the high-speed steamer. It costs eight times as much to run a 21-knot steamer as it does a 10-knot steamer. Neither the high-speed steamer nor the tramp can find business except upon established routes, where commerce and intercommunication in trade are fixed. It is the middle-class steamer of from 14 to 17 knots speed which builds up commerce. It carries few passengers, Its main . cargo is freight—cereals from the farm and the heavy machinery from the factory. These vessels will be required to build up the commerce be- tween San Francisco and Hongkong and Yokohama, between American ports and ports of South America, between American ports and the nuni- berless ports in different parts of the globe which now never see the American flag and know nothing of the products of the United States. After the middle-class vessel, which réceives the largest compensation over cost of operation under this bill, has created a steady and remuner- ative trade between an American and foreign port, then will come the demand for the swift passenger and mail boat and for the. cheap tramp. WE MUST BUILD FROM THE BOTTOM. We must not forget in this discussion the fact which it is almost impossible for an American to comprehend, that while the sea power is acknowledged now by all statesmen to be the controlling element in the world’s affairs, we must build ours up from the bottom. We have no ships; we have totally inadequate. ship yards; we have no routes of com- merce; we have no banking facilities in foreign ports; we have few agents in foreign countries for promoting the sale and advocating the merits of -American productions. Whatever facilities and Opportunities in these directions are granted to us come through the hands and by the agencies of countries who are our commercial rivals and daily becoming more jealous of our commercial growth and more inimical to our commercial power. The subsidy under this bill covers only about one-quarter of the cost of maintenance and operation for any class of vessels. Therefore every ship which derives benefits from the measure must hustle for cargo and succeed in getting it, or make its voyage at a loss. The subsidy works automatically in the promotion of an American marine. If by experience the compensation proves so large that there is an undue profit, immediately American capital puts more ships in commission and en- larges the merchant marine. If our merchant marine, by reason of its prosperity, grows beyond the amount which is appropriated, then it is distributed pro rata, with a diminishing compensation to each of the bene- ficiaries. It was found, on investigation, that Americans whose business education and experience had been in ocean transportation, after strug- gling vainly to live under the American flag and American registry, handi- capped by the excessive cost as against the European flag and registry, rather than retire from business purchased ships abroad and are sailing them under the Belgian and other flags. There will be available of this class of vessels now running and under contract about 300,000 tons, but an amendment has been accepted limiting the privilege to 200,000. This will be an immediate addition of that amount to our American merchant marine. It will enable these Americans who have experience tu work under the American flag, and we will get the advantage of their commercial and transportation skill for the purposes of promoting the increase of the American merchant marine and the enlargement of Ameri- can commerce. They can come in with their ships, however, only on half the compensation which is allowed to the American ships now sailing under the American flag, or hereafter to be built in American ship yards, and before that one-half compensation can be secured they must build an equal amount of tonnage in American ship yards, by American labor, to be sailed under the American flag. It is estimated that there is paid by American producers to foreign ship owners in freight charges at least $75,000,000 a year. Four per cent. upon this would give us an American merchant marine and the expenditure of the greater part of this money in our own country. Political economists and statisticians in foreign lands do not hesitate to say that there is no country in the world which could stand this drain of $175,000,000 paid to foreigners, to be expended in for- eign countries and for foreign labor, except the United States. It is estimated that if our tonnage was carried in American bottoms, and the money paid to American ships, and American ship yards enlarged to meet the demands of American construction, there would be direct employment given to nearly 200,000 men. The indirect employment—in the steel mills to the makers of the plates and frames, in machine shops to the makers of the machinery, in the iron ore mines to the delvers for the ore, and in the coal mines to the laborers in coal—would be equally great, if not greater, while the farmer, upon the well-known principle that the ptox- imity of the market for his produce and the saving of transportation add to his profit, would have these additional markets at home for the products which now are carried great distances and transported abroad at his ex- pense before he can receive the benefits of his harvest. Every transporta- tion man, indeed every business man, knows that the infallible test of any enterprise is the confidence which it inspires among bankers and investors. With money so plenty that it commands, upon gilt-edge securities for permanent investment, only 3 per cent., and in temporary loans averages but 2, capital in the hands of enterprising, energetic, and venturesome Americans is always seeking remunerative work. In London, Paris and Berlin the bankers are eager for the bonds of the English, the French, and the German lines as security for loans, while the investing public are equally anxious to secure an interest in those enterprises. It is almost impossible, as I know from having seen those securities come before the finance committees of institutions, for the American ship owner to secure, at any rate of interest, a loan upon his securities. They must be backed up, outside of their intrinsic merit, by abundant personal indorsement. HISTORY OF TRANSPORTATION IS REDUOTION OF RATES, The whole history of transportation in the United States is the story of constantly reducing rates upon railroads; this constant reduction going, not to the stockholders or bondholders of the railroads, but to the farmers and the manufacturers in the reduction of freight charges. American railways started with charges per ton per mile equal to those of foreign countries, and now they are less than one-third of those charges. The same law—the inevitable law. of profit promoting competing Opportunities —will act upon the ocean. . The struggle for business will stimulate busi- ness at the same time that the bid for business decreases the rates. In a few years the farmers of the country will have the benefit of this decrease in lower freights upon the ocean, as they now have it in this diminished cost of carriage upon the rail, without which no farmer could raise and have carried to the seaboard his harvests from the great western or north- western states. The American captain and the officers of American ships would be advance agents wherever they landed for the goods which they carry. With the American merchant marine will come the American banker in the central ports of the world, and beside the American banker will be the live, hustling, and invincible American agent for the sale of American products. Great productiveness has its perils as well as its advantages. Our surplus exported last year amounted to about $1,500,000,000, and will con- stantly increase. Any check upon its markets abroad or its facilities for reaching them must cause at once suspension of both enterprise and em- ployment. We have coming to the front every year from our schools millions of youths who must of necessity join our industrial army. Every measure or enterprise or employment of capital which takes care of them is a blessing to the workers already in the field, as well as to those recruits who are adding to our national power and wealth. As I have said betore, with our merchant marine, our ship yards and our ships and their con- tributing industries will enlist hundreds of thousands of them; but the other hundreds of thousands must be cared for by finding profitable sale for that which they produce. What New York wants with her commanding financial, commercial and industrial interests, what the country needs and needs now, is a mer-— chant marine, and the principles of this bill are the only practical methods in sight for the accomplishment of that purpose. We are not interested as to who of our fellow citizens gets the money if they earn it, but we are deeply concerned that somebody shall get it who will construct ship yards and build and ‘navigate American ships. TWO CRUISERS AND A BATTLESHIP. [Special to the Marine Review.] Newport News, Va., Jan. 30—Much interest is felt here in ‘the announcement that representatives of the navy department and of the Newport News Ship Building & Dry Dock Co. have come to terms in reference to the matter of constructing one of the sheathed. battleships for which bids were recently opened and regarding which there was a hitch on account of the high prices demanded by the builders, This means that this yard will build two of the armored cruisers and one battleship. On account of sentimental reasons it is earnestly hoped that the battleship constructed here will be christened Virginia, as everybody recognizes that it would be in accord with the eternal fitness of things for the Virginia yard to build the vessel which is to bear the name of the “Old Dominion.” It is also hoped that one of the cruisers to be built here will be the Maryland. , The bid of the ship yard on the joiner work for the rebuilt North German Lloyd. steamer Main has been sent to the headquarters of the steamship line in Germany. If the local company is successful in securing this part of the contract the entire job will reach in the neighborhood ot $1,000,000, as the steel work foots up something above $600,000 and the cost of the woodwork is estimated at something like $300,000. It is undoubtedly the largest repair contract ever tackled in this country, and when the vessel leaves the dock here she will probably be in just as good condition as she was the day she went into commission.