388 ADDRESS OF HON. WILLIAM C. REDFIELD. 



which includes all elements of cost and the profit. I have been furnished 

 the details of cost for a Lake ore carrier with a cargo capacity of 6,600 tons. 

 Labor is not the largest element of expense, even when the captain's salary- 

 is reckoned for the full year, though the ship is idle four months. The items 

 of depreciation, based upon wiping out the investment in twenty years of 

 insurance premiums, and of handling cargo at terminals, are all of them 

 greater than the wages. Reckoning every element of cost, it appears that 

 wages are but 14 J per cent of the total cost and that the labor cost per ton- 

 mile is less than .011 of a cent. It also appears that a reduction in wages of 

 25 per cent would reduce the cost of operation less than 3! per cent. 



So, too, I venture to think that in a ship like the Hendrick Hudson on 

 our North River, if she be reckoned as carrying 4,000 passengers, which is 

 1 ,000 less than she is licensed to carry, it is probably that the labor cost per 

 passenger-mile is as low as that of like service anywhere in the world. The 

 answer to these facts is that these are specialized ships existing under pecu- 

 liar conditions which cannot be duplicated. It is true they are specialized 

 ships. The whole progress of American industries has been one of special- 

 izing. That is the respect in which it is different from the foreign methods, 

 and the point made here and which I wish to emphasize is that men with 

 open minds and departing from tradition have devised and operate a ship 

 on special lines for special work. The result in shipbuilding and ship oper- 

 ating has been in America just what it has been on other American industries 

 — namely, the reduction of the cost to one of the lowest points known, if not 

 actually the lowest point known. Just as this fact is a pointer to us in our 

 factory dealing with the line of progress, so I venture to think it is a finger 

 that points the way for our marine generally. 



But we are told again that conditions are not the same. Certainly 

 they are not, but to some degree they may be similar, and how far have we 

 gone elsewhere toward meeting them? It is an ordinary truth in a factory, 

 as it is in your machine shops, that a tool to be efficient must be kept oper- 

 ating the largest possible percentage of the working day. You do this, of 

 course, but it is not done with the ships when you have built them and they 

 are put in operation. You equip your plants with handling apparatus 

 because you have learned that one of the great losses in industry is the cost of 

 handling goods unnecessarily, but your ship, which is after all an apparatus to 



