386 ADDRESS OF HON. WILLIAM C. REDFIELD. 



We used in our shop often to speak of the great difference between 

 making and manufacturing. Anybody can make a thing at some cost or 

 other, but it takes speciaUzed plants and apphed brains to manufacture. 

 Now, our shipyards have, in the very nature of things, been obUged too much 

 to "make" ships and have had too Uttle opportunity to "manufacture'' 

 them. They have conducted a manufacturing retail business instead of a 

 manufacturing wholesale one, and it is not to be expected that they can reach 

 the highest efficiency so long as this continues. It is therefore to be hoped 

 that the vast increase of ovu foreign trade and the coming of the Panama 

 Canal, together with our growth of competing power, will make it possible 

 in the near future for something like definite manufacturing of ships to take 

 place. That our yards have developed greatly in efficiency in spite of this 

 retail nature of their trade is to their credit. Yet have they always been as 

 keenly appreciative of what the real advantages of standardization are as 

 they might have been, or has the retail past rather too much overshadowed 

 them when the wholesale was present? 



A yard upon the Lakes took five ships, all alike, away from our coast 

 yards at a lower price. Then it took five more, and the cost of the second 

 five was quite a little less than that of the first five, as it ought to have 

 been ; and now there are five more proposed, and the cost of the third five will 

 be still less, for we have now a real case of manufacturing. Furthermore, I 

 am told by those who are in position to know that these last five come in cost 

 measurably near to the Glasgow price before the latter advanced to its 

 present high figure. 



There is beginning, then, to be a call for numbers of ships sufficient to 

 manufacture them and to put the business of building them on a wholesale 

 instead of a retail basis. A case in point is the fleet of steam barges which 

 has also been ordered from Lake yards for southern use and the tank vessels 

 now building there. There can be no question that the development of 

 this phase of our industry will mean a great increase in competing power over 

 the advance that has already taken place. A year ago we took in London 

 in competition with England fourteen small steamers for the Amazon. I 

 am told more are coming. 



It is a fact, too, to-day that material costs less in America than it does 

 abroad. I have here an advertisement of American ship plates in the Far 



