194 HOW CAN AMERICAN SHIPS COMPETE 



ican lines and their European competitors, a hostile Congress, dominated by sectional preju- 

 dice, struck down the American mail subventions and thereby destroyed every one of the 

 American steamship services in the transatlantic trade. 



At this time the American Collins Line, with the largest and swiftest ships, was receiv- 

 ing a subsidy of $858,000' a year, and the rival Cunard Line $856,871 for smaller and inferior 

 steamers. Soon after the Collins Line was killed by the act of our national lawmakers the 

 Cunard mail pay was reduced by Parliament, demonstrating clearly that it was an aggressive 

 fighting subsidy and nothing else. 



But the British and other European policies of generous aid to national shipping lines, 

 and thereby to steamship building and navigation, continued steadily without a break. It is 

 sometimes urged that these governmental aids were not applied to "tramp" steamers. Directly 

 they were not until France and Italy began to subsidize their entire shipping forty years ago. 

 But, as a matter of fact, in a broad, true sense these European subventions and other assist- 

 ances in those earlier years did quicken and strengthen the then new arts of iron steam ship- 

 building and boiler and engine building in such a way that even the "tramp" steamers that 

 came afterwards were indirectly the beneficiaries of the system. Moreover, the subsidized 

 national mail lines pioneered and created commerce a part of which the "tramps" subsequently 

 carried. 



Until the United States in the Ocean Mail Act of 1891 tardily renewed the subsidy sys- 

 tem in America, the decline of our own shipping remained constant. This Ocean Mail Law, 

 though sadly crippled by western agricultural opposition in its passage through the House of 

 Representatives, did set the American flag again afloat on the great route across the western 

 ocean and did permanently strengthen our steamship communications with the West Indies, 

 nearby South America and Australasia. Services subsidized under the ocean mail law owned 

 almost all the steam tonnage we had in ocean commerce when the great World War broke 

 upon us in midsummer of 1914. 



Turning from this survey of the past to the new present, what do we discover? Is 

 there no more hope for successful American competition with foreign shipping than there 

 was before the late great war ? 



For one thing, America has now what before the war it did not have — a large, actual, 

 seagoing merchant tonnage available for immediate employment in overseas carrying. It 

 has the ships and it also has the managers, the operators, the officers and the men. It is now 

 conveying about one-third of our imports and exports, or three times the proportion of before 

 the war. Moreover, the American people, even to a degree the long-indifferent middle west, 

 have been shocked by the war into a realization that, for peace or war, a strong merchant 

 shipping is absolutely indispensable to America. 



The nation has 8,000,000 gross tons of newly acquired merchant vessels on its hands, 

 ships in which all the American people are stockholders. These stockholders are unitedly 

 determined that our ships worth having shall not pass out from imder the American flag. Any 

 political clique or party that consented to haul down the flag would be committing instant 

 suicide. 



So the general outlook of the present is immensely more favorable than that of before the 

 war for the development of a great ocean shipping and shipbuilding industry. But the 

 obstacles in the way are substantially the same obstacles — the higher cost of operation and 

 perhaps of construction of American vessels, the fact that even now our foreign competitors 

 are in possession of two-thirds of the field, and the further fact that these foreign competi- 



