MESSAGE ON FOREIGN TRADE 345 



foreigners, and of its so-called "fighting fleet" the foreign shipping 

 conference combine drove independent vessels off the seas, carrying 

 rates for grain and cotton, which in 1910, were, respectively, .03 and .12 

 were "readjusted" by 1913 to .10 and .45, respectively. He knows 

 that the tribute he paid out of his profits to the foreign ships was 

 trebled in three years, and that hurts ! Therefore, and therefrom, he 

 insists that our merchant marine be enabled to protect him from further 

 extortion of that sort. 



Nor have the leading men of the various communities who make up 

 these chambers of commerce confined their study to American condi- 

 tions, but have looked abroad and inquired into what other governments 

 were doing to obtain more foreign trade for their nationals, and what 

 did they find ? They soon came to learn that many useful things done 

 across the water by governments for the governed are here forbidden 

 by our laws. Chief among those governmental aids to enterprising ex- 

 porters abroad is reduced railroad rates to the seaboard given for ex- 

 ports, and the encouragement for firms which are competitors in the 

 home market to band together for foreign trade. Their competition at 

 home keeps down the home prices, but once across their national frontier 

 they fight onl}'' foreigners and combine to do so. Now, with us a lower 

 preferential rate on railroads for export articles is forbidden by the 

 Interstate Commerce Act and the rulings of its Commission, while the 

 Sherman Act interferes with combinations for foreign trade. All the 

 foregoing is known to the organized activity of business men constitut- 

 ing these great commercial organizations. They have done everything 

 possible to help themselves, but now they realize that governmental 

 action is necessary to liberate our merchant marine from its present 

 trammels, to release the over-regulated railroads from those regulations 

 which prevent their assisting our exporters and to free our producers 

 to make such combinations in foreign fields as they like. Give us this 

 new freedom for our foreign trade, and American brains and energy 

 will soon get for American labor and capital what has been so long 

 going to foreign labor and capital. 



Of these three great and immediate reliefs now so widely and so 

 earnestly desired by organized business men the two mentioned last are 

 the more easily obtained. Laws could speedily be enacted, one modify- 

 ing the Interstate Commerce Act so as to permit railroads to grant 

 preferential rates on goods to the seaboard intended for export, and 

 the other amending the Sherman Act so that it shall be lawful to make 

 combinations for trade outside our borders. x\s to the third point, the 

 assistance of our merchant marine — it has been so much discussed that 

 it has come to seem a difficult problem, but is it? Let us see. ^Ye 

 carry only 8 per cent, of our foreign trade in American ships and we have 

 to pay any rates for the rest of it that the foreign shipping combine 



VOL. LXXXVI. — 24. 



