234 BANQUET. 
ship Line going out of business, yes; and some of the Robert Dollar boats, maybe. 
You never knew where they were going; they seemed to change around here and there. 
I do not know whether Robert Dollar is here tonight, but that is true, and he knows it. 
Some boats with a German flag I saw—they were interned. But the American flag, 
outside of the coastwise ships and the United States fleet and in the Philippines, was 
very little in evidence. I felt sad to think I had worked for four or five years on the 
Merchant Marine Committee and had not been able to assist in evolving some scheme 
to keep the American flag on the sea. 
We hope this bill is going to keep the American flag on the sea (applause), but it 
is not going to keep it there unless you gentlemen leave this room tonight and make 
up your minds you will help. It is not going to be kept on the sea by exorbitant charges 
against your ships—by foolish business methods, by subsidiary shipping companies 
that provide supplies to the ships, by subsidiary repair companies that get the rake- 
off of the repair yards. It is going to be kept on the sea only if you gentlemen will 
make up your minds to see that all these wrongs are corrected and to see the ships of 
the United States treated as fairly and as honestly and as rightly as foreign ships are 
treated. (Applause.) 
I will go a little further into the Jones Bill. One part of the bill is arranged for 
rebating taxes, so that you can build ships, and I presume that is particularly of interest 
to you in your line of work. You men mostly are in the shipbuilding business and want 
to build ships. This rebating of taxes will give you business. The establishment 
of the American Bureau of Shipping, I believe, is now successfully launched, and 
men in the shipping and shipbuilding business must make use of the American Bureau 
of Shipping. You cannot make these ships operate with foreign tools. You must 
operate these ships with your own tools. You have enough ships on which to make a 
good start, and we are trying to give you the tools for more enlargement, so it is up to 
you to use them. 
The establishment of the preferred mortgage was quite a step in advance. I do 
not suppose my ship-repair friends will like it, but we thought it was advisable to give 
two statuses to the mortgage, one the old status and the second one the preferred status, 
so in event a man wanted to borrow money and could not find anyone to lend on one 
kind of mortgage, he could borrow on the other. 
The protection of the coastwise trade has always been American and always will 
be continued, I hope. The postal subventions which have been hardly called upon 
by the Shipping Board is another tool that can be made use of to keep the ships operat- 
ing. The assistance of the army engineers in developing ports will be a good thing. 
The new section, which will prevent the giving of deferred rebates to any ship 
coming to this country and making the penalty the exclusion of the ships of such lines, 
is very valuable and will help us considerably. Further, it is required if for any reason 
the foreign shipowners band themselves together and give deferred rebates between 
foreign ports, if they do not give the American ship in that same trade the same oppor- 
tunity to join in the deferred rebate arrangement their ships will be excluded from 
our ports also. (Applause.) 
One thing that has particularly puzzled me is why it is—and this is true of New 
York—why it is that we have such poor facilities at our ports. All of the ports that 
expect to be selected as terminals for this merchant marine had better look to their 
port facilities. I have been amazed to find the tremendous costs of the handling of 
