192 HOW CAN AMERICAN SHIPS COMPETE 



that, in the period from 1840 to 1860, the British iron industry was greater than our own. 

 British machine shops and steam shipyards were mightily encouraged and strengthened by 

 the generous British policy of mail shipping subsidies, initiated in 1840 and maintained witli 

 vigor and persistence until competing American steam services were driven from the seas. 



But American shipowners and builders were by no means so unmindful of the advan- 

 tages of steam propulsipn and iron hulls as some of the commentators upon the fate of our 

 ocean shipping have contended. The iron propeller steamer Bangor was built on the Dela- 

 ware in 1845, a thoroughly efficient vessel for that period. In the years between 1850 and 

 1861 good iron steamers were built on the Delaware, at New York and at Boston. Indeed, 

 good American iron was fotmd to be superior for shipyard purposes. The United States 

 possessed admirable iron works and a substantial body of highly skilled mechanics, as was 

 to be demonstrated later by the rapid and successful building of a fleet of monitors that 

 proved a decisive factor in the Civil War. Not only monitors but broadside armorclads and 

 iron cruisers were constructed in this country in the Civil War period, and a vast impetus 

 was given to boiler and engine-making establishments at the northern seaports by the swift 

 creation of a new fleet of the six hundred war steamers that constituted in 1865 the most 

 modern and formidable navy in the world. 



All these facilities for the building of steam, iron, seagoing merchant ships could readily 

 have been turned to the construction of a new merchant tonnage in 1865 and after if there 

 had been any positive aid and encouragement to the successful operation of these American 

 ships after they were completed. But, though the dominant republican administrations of 

 that period wrought a gigantic success in the protection and development of the manufactur- 

 ing industries of the country, the overseas shipping trade of the United States was left wholly 

 without any equivalent encouragement. What was more natural and inevitable, therefore, 

 than that manufacturing should flourish and ocean shipping still further decline through those 

 years when Great Britain, thanks to the depredations of Anglo-Confederate cruisers, had 

 dealt a terrible blow to our sail tonnage and had possessed herself of that lion's share of 

 our overseas carrying which she retained up to the outbreak of the great World War. 



Without protection to the operation of American ships, the continued protection to the 

 building of such ships of course proved wholly ineffective. Though iron ship construction, 

 particularly in the Delaware district, made respectable progress in the years following the 

 Civil War, these new iron steamships were designed for the protected coastwise trade, except 

 for a few large passenger and mail steamers for the Pacific Mail, four excellent transatlan- 

 tic liners for the Philadelphia and Liverpool service of the old American Line, and other 

 good but smaller steamers for the nearby West India services. 



Under the sharply contrasting conditions wherein British yards were building in swift 

 succession twenty iron steamers while our yards were building one — that is to say while 

 British yards were steadily manufacturing ships and our yards were producing irregularly a 

 slender tonnage — what was more natural than that we should be seriously handicapped by a 

 wide difference in the relative costs of construction? When in 1904-5 the Congressional Mer- 

 chant Marine Commission under President Roosevelt made a careful survey of shipbuilding 

 prices in this country and in Europe, the commission was constrained to report that steel 

 steamships of the passenger and cargo type were costing from 40 to 45 per cent more on 

 this side than on the other side of the Atlantic. Under the circumstances, with no aid or pro- 

 tection whatsoever for American shipowners and operators, it was hopeless to dream of em- 

 ploying any considerable numbers of American-built ships in overseas commerce. 



