346 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



decide upon. We all want to get back to some such laws as were put on 

 our statute books in 1789 by Washington, Madison and Jefferson, at a 

 time when our ships carried but 23 per cent, of our exports and im- 

 ports, and which laws by 1800 had already raised that percentage to 

 89 per cent., and by 1810 to 91^/2 per cent., at the same time giving 

 us a merchant marine that won for us the war of 1813. In 1828, when 

 we were carrying 89 per cent, of our trade, the agricultural south and 

 west combined against the shipping interests of New England and 

 passed the Reciprocity Act of 1828, opening our trade to foreign com- 

 petition, whereupon there at once began a loss which has now shrunk 

 our total down to a paltry and shameful 8 per cent. A democratic 

 southern President, Polk, seeing the success of English subsidies in the 

 then new steamship trade, followed their example and soon our success 

 in steamships was rivaling our earlier success in clipper-built ships, 

 but the bitter sectional quarrel between south and north in 1856 caused 

 the southerners in Congress, led by Jefferson Davis, to strike a blow at 

 the shipbuilding north by repealing the mail subsidies. It succeeded. 

 Thank God that quarrel and its cause no longer exist. 



To-day the cotton-growing south and the grain-growing west are as 

 alive as the northeastern seaboard to the need for freeing our merchant 

 marine from the meshes of the net that is strangling it. 



Everybody wants our merchant marine assisted — it was promised 

 by all parties in the campaign of 1912. What happened after the elec- 

 tion? The democratic party in control of both branches of the Con- 

 gress and of the executive enacted the tariff law of October 3, 1913, and 

 in it put a section granting 5 per cent, reduction in duties to goods 

 carried in American bottoms. Sundry foreign governments promptly 

 filed protests with the State Department. These foreign governments 

 had long been planning to prevent any return by us to the laws which 

 succeeded so brilliantly in the early days of our republic. Thanks to 

 certain secretaries of state more eager to perpetuate their names on 

 treaties than to learn the history and policy of their department, those 

 foreigners succeeded in weaving a web of treaties which in the opinion 

 of the x\ttorney General of the United States (rendered October 31, 

 1913, to the Secretary of the Treasury), nullified all that part of the 

 act which attempted to assist our merchant marine. And that was the 

 end of it? No, it was only the end of that chapter, for the people of 

 the United States waked up for the first time to the fact that constant 

 vigilance must henceforth be given to what contracts our State Depart- 

 ment makes with foreign powers. We now insist on knowing if good 

 bargains are being made for us, so flagrantly have many of our diplo- 

 matists been outwitted in the past, as witness this mesh of treaties that 

 seem to leave us powerless to do what Washington, Madison and Jef- 

 ferson did in 1789. 



