BANQUET. 363 



ceived picture and that I believe form food for the serious thought of you who are here 

 tonight. 



A great difficulty surrounding any study of our merchant marine lies in the fact that 

 no reliable basis of comparison can be found in the past. 



Because of the war, no single year of the past ten can be here marked as normal, while 

 conditions more than ten years ago are too dissimilar to those existing today to form as accu- 

 rate a comparison as could be wished. 



The study of the water-borne export and import trade of the United States must, there- 

 fore, be made from basic facts. Opinions as to the future will, of necessity, be largely matters 

 of judgment and belief. Minor fluctuations must be ignored or assigned to tlieir true causes, 

 while general trends of broad and basic conditions must be picked out clearly from the con- 

 fusing background of less vital facts. 



In attacking this broad problem, we have not considered whether or no certain indus- 

 tries can be fostered in the United States, but only whether or no the sea-borne commerce 

 of the United States, measured in terms of tons, as used by the shipowner, is growing; in 

 what direction this commerce chiefly moves ; how it is likely to change in the future ; what 

 ratio, from the standpoint of quantity, is carried by American ships and what under foreign 

 flags ; and more than all, how an increase in the number of American-flag ships can be made 

 to go hand in hand with an increase in American trade and, therefore, increase the wealth 

 and prosperity of the American people. (Applause.) 



Man's first requirement is the air he breathes, then food, then clothing and shelter and 

 then luxuries. These have resulted in a natural cycle of progress for civilized cotintries which 

 have passed in order from the grazing to the agricultural and then to the manufacturing stage 

 of their development. Progress has naturally been more rapid where the necessary raw ma- 

 terials to permit a country to become a manufacturing nation have been most easily availa- 

 ble. Sparsely populated countries must raise the food supply for the densely populated man- 

 ufacturing territories, and this broad principle, to a very wide extent, underlies the general 

 commerce of the world. 



In these United States, with thirty-six persons to each square mile of our continental ter- 

 ritory, we are generally considered a food-producing nation. Our output of grains and meats 

 is enormous, but so is the population which it must sustain. We still export large amounts 

 of food and necessarily did so during the war, and will continue to do so until the deficiency 

 caused by the Russian cataclysm has been made good from other sources. Now, here we 

 come to the first, to me, startling fact in our study. The peak of the United States develop- 

 ment as an exporter of raw foodstuffs was passed as far back as 1880. By this, I mean 

 that in 1880 the percentage by value of foodstuffs to the total value O'f exports reached its 

 maximum. In 1880, foodstuffs constituted close to 60 per cent of exports. In 1920, this 

 had fallen to 25 per cent of exports. The United States of seventy-five years ago may be 

 compared to the Brazil, the Argentine, the Australia and the Canada of today. 



It is of vital interest to compare the percentage by value of exports of raw materials and 

 manufactured articles over the last seventy years. In 1850, manufactured articles were less 

 than 20 per cent by value of our exports; raw materials other than foodstuffs, about 60 

 per cent ; and foodstuffs, crude and manufactured, about 20 per cent. In 1920, after many 

 years of quite uniform growth, the per cent by value of raw materials has dropped to 20; 

 the export of manufactured and crude foodstuffs constitutes about 25 per cent by value; 

 and the export of manufactured articles has risen to 55 per cent, so that today, without giving 



