BANQUET. 327 



ADDRESS BY MR. HOMER L. FERGUSON. 



Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, it would not be very difficult for me to tell you 

 how much I appreciate being back with you again at an annual banquet after an absence of 

 two or three years, and yet on, this particular occasion, my duty, while a pleasant one, I 

 know you realize is a somewhat difficult one. We shipbuilders have, for so many years, 

 had so many grouches of one kind and another until very recently, that you will appreci- 

 ate that in the presence of the Navy and of the Shipping Board and of the new shipbuild- 

 ers, it is very difficult for an old-time, has-been shipbuilder to speak his piece. 



We are all of us, this year, my friends, able to afford a good dinner, and we hope we 

 will be able to come again next year and perhaps the year after. After that God only 

 knows what will happen. The ships are built, the ships are operating, and we are told of 

 the thousands of tons started out and how many will be launched this week, and next week, 

 and the week after next, but we are not told a great deal about the possibilities of future 

 building. 



We who build ships know they are built for men to operate, and we know that they 

 must be operated profitably, or they will not be operated at all, certainly not for a consider- 

 able length of time, except perhaps as in the case of the railroads, at government expense ; 

 we know even that, after a while, may pall on the American taxpayer. The problems of ship- 

 building and ship operating and of commerce are interdependent, with the shipbuilding end 

 of the problem absolutely dependent on the amount of freight, goods and people carried 

 and the commerce done by the owner. We simply satisfy him as best we can — sometimes 

 it is a fearful job. 



We have heard a great deal during the war of the new shipyards and of the standard 

 shipyards, and all that sort of thing, and I personally want to pay my tribute as an en- 

 gineer and shipbuilder to the tremendous work that was done by the Emergency Fleet Cor- 

 poration and by those people who built these enormous yards in such a very short time, and 

 are now turning out ships at a very rapid rate. I think, for instance, Hog Island is one of 

 the greatest performances that anyone could imagine. I do think, of course, in our ship- 

 building, that we are somewhat like General Shanks with his regiments at home — the war 

 ended a little too quickly for us really to get into it. But it ended happily, and I want to 

 assure our British friends that we went into it with both feet and both hands, and that we 

 were going to become prepared to lick these gentlemen all by ourselves, and without assist- 

 ance, if it could not be done in any other way. (Applause.) 



Any man who does not think we went into the war on that scale wants to take a look 

 at the tremendous improvements which took place not only in shipyards but all up and down 



