EXTENSION OF OUR MERCHANT MARINE 349 



these exports we pay a large part of our annual charge of 600 to 800 

 millions due to the rest of the world for interest, dividends, freights, 

 and payments and remittances of various kinds. If there were no 

 ships in which these goods could be exported, what pen could describe 

 the financial and industrial chaos in which we should be plunged? 

 Think of the point to which wheat would drop. Think of the iron 

 furnaces out of blast, the mines closed down, the farmers ruined, and 

 our gold-supply exhausted, unless universal repudiation were enforced. 

 The picture is too horrible to contemplate, and yet, like a drunken man 

 dancing on a tight rope, we go on relying upon the Providential mercy 

 which has thus far preserved us from such a national catastrophe. 

 This is no fig-ure of rhetoric, or over-drawn picture. It is a self-evident 

 peril, which stares us in the face and to which only fatuous folly will 

 seek to close its eyes. 



But have we no ships, you may ask? Oh yes, if you will refer to 

 the last issue of Lloyd's Register you will be gratified to find that the 

 American Merchant Marine comprises 3,100 vessels of over 5,300,000 

 tons gross register, and these figures are the narcotic which has lulled 

 to sleep so many of our statesmen and business men and economists. 

 But if you will analyze these figures, and subtract the vessels which ply 

 only upon our lakes, rivers, bays, sounds, or canals, and which are either 

 absolutely imprisoned on our inland seas, or otherwise unavailable for 

 ocean transportation, you will have left only 361 vessels of a gross ton- 

 nage of 1,375,000 tons to represent our ocean-going American Mer- 

 chant Marine, and even from that paltry remnant there should probably 

 be a further deduction made on account of vessels which, owing to their 

 limited size, are not commercially available. The available ocean-going 

 marine is therefore just about equal in tonnage to the fleet of one single 

 German company. Put in a different form, whereas in 1861 over 65 

 per cent, of our foreign commerce was carried in American bottoms, in 

 1901 only 8 per cent, was so carried. To-day our foreign commerce 

 represents about one eighth of the world's total, and not more than one 

 tenth of that one eighth, or 11/4 per cent, of the world's commerce, is 

 carried in American bottoms. For the carriage of the other nine tenths 

 of our foreign commerce it is estimated that we are paying to the ship- 

 owners of other nations in ocean freights and passage-money from 

 $200,000,000 to $250,000,000 a year. This is a direct loss, and takes 

 no account of the profits we might make if, like other nations, we 

 engaged in the business of transporting goods other than our own. By 

 the neglect of this business it is therefore evident that we are not only 

 (a) losing these last-mentioned possible profits, and (&) paying this 

 enormous and killing charge, but we are also subjecting ourselves daily 

 to the frightful risk of an utter paralyzation of our whole foreign 

 trade. 



