262 BANQUET. 
fined $150 and sent up for ninety days. He had a consultation with the judge about it. He 
had employed lawyers who took his money and fought the case, but he was convicted. He 
said: “Judge, I made a mistake; if I had just pleaded guilty in the beginning I do not 
believe you would have fined me more than $150 and would not have sentenced me for 
more than sixty days. I make the best liquor in this county, I double distills all my liquor 
and sells it to the best bankers and merchants in Newport News. I think they have enough 
to last sixty days, but I am afraid their supply will run out before the end of ninety days, and 
they will have to get another bootlegger.” We might be satisfied with three or five years, 
but a ten-year holiday is a pretty long time. 
This proposition of the merchant marine and the building of big ships is very much 
like building warships. The elements are practically the same—speed, power, size, equip- 
ment—and a knowledge of all of these things is necessary in a trained personnel. I hope, 
and every man in this room, I am sure, hopes that it will be made possible in some proper 
way for those who buy ships to operate them profitably, so that shipbuilding and ship 
operating under the American flag may continue. 
We have a great many ships now, mostly nondescript; there are 300 in the James 
River, almost in sight of our shipyard, built during the war, good enough ships of their 
kind, but too much of a kind, something like a railroad with all coal cars, no passenger 
cars and no Pullman cars. 
We have built some passenger ships with which you are familiar, and the operation of 
the ships is important, and I am sure that the gentlemen who are operating them now are 
doing the best they can with them. We have some of the most competent men in the in- 
dustry handling these ships. Our interest in the shipbuilding industry is based very largely 
on the success of our customers. If our customers cannot operate successfully, we cannot 
build ships, because there will be no demand for them. 
How is it that the merchants are generally favorable to protection, but in connection 
with one of the most necessary and needful industries in our country we are told we must 
not protect shipping. Why should we people who live in the United States, paying United 
States wages, not have the protection in an essential industry that other people have? I 
do not understand it. I do not understand the antagonism to it. I can see why a rank 
free trader would say, ‘‘and then we can compete,” but we have not done that and are 
not going to have it. We folk down south do not want it—a few cotton planters do— 
but God Almighty in the beginning protected them and arranged it so that nobody else 
could grow the stuff. We do not want it, no business wants it, and yet we are denied this 
thing, and they say a subsidy is awful, digging into the treasury and all of that kind of 
talk. Some people tell me that they are willing we should have assistance if we will call 
it something else than subsidy. Why call it something else? Why not be fair to those 
who are sent out to represent the United States on the seas? Why put them bareback in 
the world when everybody else is protected? 
There is no means of competing with the low wages in foreign countries under present 
conditions, and yet those who believe in preparedness, those who profess to believe in an 
army and navy, those who have, only a few years behind them, the great spectacle of a coun- 
try utterly powerless except when it had been forced to prepare for its defense, and when 
we know there is a career before us in the world as a whole and room for our carrying 
trade overseas, tell us that we must not do anything for the merchant marine. They do 
