260 BANQUET. 
ADDRESS OF MR. HOMER L. FERGUSON. 
Mr. President, Mr. Secretary and gentlemen, it seems to me that the General’s efforts 
rather offset his argument. Ifa man can make that kind of a talk without preparation, why 
should not what is left of our Army make a real fight without preparation? 
I have not prepared for my speech at all; in fact I broke up a portion of a ten-year 
holiday recently allotted to us to come up here and tell my friends and fellow-sufferers that 
it is not as bad as it looks. I am advising all the shipbuilders to shut up their shipyards in 
the hope that some of them will do it. That advice is similar to that given by a Yankee 
colonel luring the war to old John Murphy, a famous hotel man of Richmond, who was 
captured by this colonel. John was a very large man and a very heavy feeder, and after 
three days the colonel said to him: “Mr. Murphy, you will have to go home; I am damned 
if it is not more expensive to feed you than it is to fight you.”” And it is more expensive to 
keep going than it is to shut up, in the case of the shipyards at the present time. (Laughter. ) 
We shipbuilders have had our ups and downs—mostly downs—but we went up during 
the war. We were not on the firing line, on the field of battle, but we were on the firing 
line in this country, and a great industry which had been neglected for many years except 
by a few devotees, some of whom are here present, suddenly was magnified among all the 
industries in the United States and became one of prime and first importance. Nearly 
everybody crowded into it. Most of them have crowded out or have been crowded out, and 
we were told that, if American ingenuity and American manufacturing methods were ap- 
plied to shipbuilding and we built them by the yard or mile or section or in some other way, 
we would make more satisfactory advance, but I notice, after a trial by the greatest American 
manufacturers, who thought they should apply those methods to shipbuilding, that they 
have finally given it up. They are building Fords or trucks or plows or something else, and 
they discovered what we men who operate shipyards are now discovering—that there is a 
vast and inherent difference between shipbuilding and manufacture. I do not know much 
about building cars, but I am frank to confess that it requires a considerable degree of 
effort to get enthusiastic about a coal car. I do not suppose that anybody ever loved a 
coal car, but I think we can learn to build coal cars, and we can beat swords into plowshares 
and spears into pruning hooks, but no man born and bred to the business of building ships 
ever tried to do these things before. 
It is difficult to explain to business men, who look on profit as being the sole aim of 
business, that those who build ships and go down to the sea in ships have never engaged or 
continued in their vocations because of the profits which were involved in them, but to them 
it means an active and real thing. 
So those of us who have gotten our ten-year holiday do not feel happy over it, but we 
are reasonably sure that we can make a living, and I tell you, gentlemen, to see a great 
plant, which it took thirty years to build up, ne idle does not make me feel very happy; 
it has rather a depressing effect. 
At this table are six or eight men who, like oie as most of them my seniors— 
were sent abroad thirty years ago to learn shipbuilding, because there existed in this country 
no institution which was considered equipped and fit to teach modern shipbuilding and modern 
marine engineering, and men of the Navy who were to design the construction of navy 
