ADDRESS OF HON. WILLIAM C. REDFIELD. 389 



produce transportation, is not so equipped or so handled. Here, too, the 

 men of the Great Lakes have gone ahead. A vessel last week had 11,000 

 tons of ore taken from her in 3 hours and 15 minutes. Another ship entered 

 Duluth with a cargo in the morning and left at 1.30 p. m. with a fresh cargo 

 of 376,000 bushels of wheat. 



It would be interesting to compare the ore rates from Bilbao to the 

 Rhine or from Cuba to the United States with those existing on the Great 

 Lakes, and to analyze the reasons for such differences as may appear. 



Come back to our ship when she is put in operation. Is she as a matter 

 of fact the result of an exhaustive study, not only by shipbuilders but by 

 men whose duty it is to handle materials, of the cheapest and most efficient 

 way in which her cargo can be loaded and unloaded, or is she a traditional 

 ship representing a compromise between the elements of the visions of the 

 owner, the views of a steward and the like? She is a tool for carrying freight. 

 I am not speaking of passenger ships. Is she deliberately made the most 

 economical tool that brains can devise for getting that freight into her and 

 out of her? To a man of factory experience the waste of handling freight 

 upon any of our docks seems ruinous. If engineers inform me correctly, it 

 often costs double per ton of package freight merely to get that freight from 

 car to ship in our ports what it does to carry a ton of ore a thousand miles 

 upon the Lakes. Is not the efficiency of your ship, her ability to earn and 

 to carry herself, a problem which has two leading elements in it — namely, 

 the amount of cargo she can transport relatively to her pay roll and other 

 expenses, and the speed and economy with which she can get that cargo 

 into her and out of her? 



It would be instructive if a first-class ship designer, freed from the past, 

 would try, as a matter of professional practice, to see what was actually 

 possible in the way of a specialized ship to carry cotton or sugar. There 

 are the equivalent of eighty cargoes of 10,000 tons each of cotton going from 

 Galveston each year, and about forty more of like size each from Savannah 

 and New Orleans. The railroads that carry this cotton to the water front 

 have specialized upon it in the sense that all American railroads have special- 

 ized — namely, by larger car capacity, longer trains, heavier engines and 

 rails — the result of which has been to make American railway costs the 

 lowest in the world. But there is none of this specializing when you get to 



