ADDRESS OF HON. WILLIAM C. REDFIELD. 381 



wishing to secure it by subsidies, which is far from the case. The two are 

 mingled in the thought of many, if not most, of our people. They should 

 be detached and each proposition should stand upon its own merits. Quite 

 apart from the question of our earning for Americans the hundreds of mil- 

 lions annually paid for transporting our goods, stands the larger fact that we, 

 the greatest of the world's producing nations, cannot long tolerate the 

 thought that the control of our seaborne traffic shall rest with our commercial 

 competitors. Let it once be brought home to our people at large that the 

 grain of the Northwest, the cotton of the Southwest, the steel of Pennsyl- 

 vania, the manufactures of all our states, which are now sold abroad in 

 increasing volumes and which we must continue to sell to keep our farms 

 and factories going, enter into the control at our water fronts of those whose 

 chief interest it is to limit our export sales and substitute their own, and 

 public opinion will be very different. 



So long as it is thought merely to be a matter of who collects the freight 

 our people will not care; serious as it is to have the price of transportation 

 paid outside, but when it comes home that transport of our factory products 

 is in the hands of those whose interest it is to have the products of their own 

 factories sold instead of ours and will so arrange if they can, and that our 

 planters' cotton is also in competing hands, things will be different. We 

 need not go into details of the ill effects of this adverse control. The foreign 

 ships carry our manufactures and grain on such terms as suit them. It is 

 the interest of Americans to have these carried on such terms as suit us. The 

 foreign lines want our business indeed, but in their schedules, their manage- 

 ment, their plants, they must prefer their own nationals. It is inconceiv- 

 able that they should not do so. A German line ought not to operate its 

 American trade in a way hostile to German interests and could not long do 

 so. No more could an English line. They must so treat our American 

 trade that it shall not collide with their own interests, and when the col- 

 lision occurs their own interests must be preferred. They can combine 

 against us if they will and as in a measure they have. It comes back to the 

 word "control. " We are in the hands of our competitors to conduct a busi- 

 ness which it is vital to us should be carried on in our interest. This is a 

 bigger question than the building of ships and the making of profits by them — 

 that is personal, but the question is national. That is relatively little, 



