236 BANQUET. 
house for about $1,600, and it was very evident that the captain did not get the $2,400 
in that case. Certainly, somebody got a nice profit out of it. 
Let me tell you what your English competitors do and have done for some years. 
They have agents. These agents may be agents for one hundred ships or fifty ships, 
and they contract, at every port where they think these ships are going to touch, for 
coal for their ships. Neither the captain nor the engineer has anything to do with it. 
I remember when they first started this method of doing business. The engineers and 
the captains kicked, and were fired. Only two or three were fired, and the coal.was 
good afterwards, the voyages were made just as speedily, and that practice is being 
pursued today. The steamship owners call for bids for the supplying of coal, and 
certain companies bid on the coal supply at such and such a price, and the captain no 
longer has anything to do with it. Nobody has anything to do with it but the officials 
of the company who call for the bids and the concerns which make the successful bids. 
The bills are sent forward to the company. There is no necessity for doing any trick 
work in connection with the weight of the coal, because the coal dealer who would do 
this would be simply a plain thief. He has no reason for doing it he is not forced to 
do it, and he does not have to do it. I know of no man in Philadelphia who had con- 
tracts of this kind who would do it, an I am very sure there are many men in the coal 
business in New York who would not do it. 
I want to call your attention to the way our English friends feel about our ship- 
ping. This is a statement by Mr. J. C. Gould, a member of Parliament, writing in 
the Pall Mall Gazette. He is a British shipowner and operator. He has made a per- 
sonal investigation of the shipping situation in the United States, and among other 
things he says:— 
“Tt is difficult for an Englishman to criticise American shipping without an accu- 
sation of bias or prejudice being brought forward, but the fact remains that among 
the first to condemn the present administration are Americans of influence, judgment 
and discernment, who realize that the whole growth of American shipping has been 
due to emergency methods, has been carried on regardless of expense, has been placed 
in the hands of people lacking in knowledge and experience of ship management, and 
is based upon a system of costs so high as to make economical operation an impossibility. 
Then again, the speed and haste with which so many of the vessels were built has resulted 
in a great number of vessels which do not measure up to anything like the standard 
of foreign tonnage, and the navigation laws are diametrically opposed to sane admin- 
istration of shipping, and, moreover, the fact that the majority of the ships are owned 
by a government department does not make for economy of management, but instead 
tends toward delays of operation which prove very costly in the long run.” 
Later on he says :— 
“Stores, equipment, management and incidentals, including depreciation and 
repairs, which must of necessity be considerably higher than on British ships, add to 
the total of the costs, so that on analysis one finds that the operative costs are any- 
where between two and one-half and three and one-half times the cost of operation of 
a British vessel. It is beyond doubt a fact that British vessels will be making money 
at very much lower freights than prevail today, while American vessels will be losing 
heavily at the same time. 
“Personally, I do not think that the American people will agree to subsidize a 
mercantile marine. Evidence is forthcoming here on every hand that if American 
shipping is to have a chance of making itself a permanent institution its management 
