370 BANQUET. 



ADDRESS BY HON. E. C. PLUMMER. 



Mr. Toastmaster atid gentlemen, it is with feelings that some of you gentlemen readily 

 will appreciate that I address you tonight, for it was here thirty years ago that I first was 

 granted the privilege of becoming associated with those strong men who then were under- 

 taking a real work for the establishment of an American merchant marine; and the little 

 part I, a young man, was permitted to play in making possible the American Line, with its 

 then magnificent Atlantic greyhounds, is to me a cherished memory that the swiftly passing 

 years have left undimmed. 



Few of the men who were associated in that original undertaking are with us now; 

 and through the failure of essential legislation then attempted, their more elaborate plans, 

 which contemplated such a development of our shipping as would have meant much to this 

 country, became as they are now. 



But the passing of a generation has brought back to us the maritime opportunities which 

 those men then so clearly saw ; a greater merchant fleet than that of which those men even 

 dared to dream has been flung to us by the tempest of war — a fleet belonging to the people 

 whose sacrifices made it possible and which must, and shall be, preserved, and therefore to- 

 night I can speak with a confidence born of an assurance that the American flag is again on 

 the seas and that it is there to stay. The fact that, including American shipping under foreign 

 flags, our people now own more tonnage than any other nation should not be overlooked; 

 neither should the fact based on normal growth that it is not a case of too much world ton- 

 nage that is causing the fleet tie-up of today, but a falling off in cargoes of which Germany's 

 change from 130,000,000 tons in 1913 to 30,000,000 tons in 1921 is but one illustration. 



Therefore it is not inappropriate that one whose home is by the river where, thirteen 

 years before the Pilgrims landed, there was built the first ocean-going vessel the New World 

 had produced, the historic Virginia, should speak of this country's shipping spirit — a spirit 

 which sometimes has slumbered, but which did achieve so much that was glorious in the past 

 and which now is in position to renew its triumphs wherever ships may go. 



The measureless losses from which our people suffered during those awful years of the 

 World War have impressed upon this generation that unchanging truth so clearly understood 

 by our fathers, that merchant shipping is one of the four cornerstones upon which the per- 

 manent prosperity of this nation rests — a stone that cannot be removed without imperiling the 

 whole structure. In this our education is not unique. These established facts have not only 

 been taught to, and recognized by, other countries, but they were emphasized by the ex- 

 perience of our own people long ago. The cruel trials and losses of the Pilgrims, sustained 

 while their helplessness compelled them to trust their humble, but to them vital, cargoes 

 to the vessels of others who should have been their friends, so pitifully pictured in Brad- 

 ford's simply worded narrative, is one which no American who reads the record can forget ; 

 and the fact that the first commercial act of the Massachusetts Bay Colonists was to construct 

 a then great ship, the Blessing of the Bay, that they might have tonnage which should enable 

 them to handle their own products and not leave them at the mercy of men across the sea, 

 has the same significance now as it had in those early days. 



Fresh in the minds of those men was the knowledge that the ablest statesmen ever 



