392 ADDRESS OF HON. WILLIAM C. REDFIELD. 



quantities of this same material. If then these terminal facilities so adapted 

 to the goods and the ships could be leased for a term of years to a company 

 that would build and operate the ships, would there not be created a normal 

 preference to which none could object? Would not the vessels proposed, 

 being designed as intelligently in all other respects as they would be specially 

 prepared for receiving and discharging cargo, be able to make many more 

 trips and add largely to their percentage of operating time? Suppose then 

 that they could not carry freight at as low a cost and that there was a lesser 

 margin of profit in a competing rate, they could afford to run at a larger cost 

 by reason of the lesser expense of handling their goods at their terminal. If 

 the company were able to add like facilities at the foreign port or to the extent 

 that it was able to better the facilities there that its rivals had, it would add 

 a still further element of competing power. 



I appreciate that the profession of designing vessels, both in their hulls 

 and in motive power, is in a state of flux, and it is my hope that out of this 

 very condition that may come which is of great value to the American 

 marine. I am entirely willing to provide for discriminating duties in favor 

 of American bottoms if so be, however, that it shall be insured that there is to 

 be no increase in transportation rates on that account. I see no harm in a 

 preferential capitation tax on immigrants in American ships or some prefer- 

 ence import charges or in tonnage tax, provided these or any of them can 

 be done without interference with treaties or without injuring that enor- 

 mous export trade upon which we are coming increasingly to depend. But 

 none of these preferences have a moral right to exist until American designers 

 in all the branches that make up the marine shall have cast aside the weight 

 of tradition and shall have put into their professional work that same exec- 

 utive imagination which has given us the telephone, which produced the 

 wireless telegraph, and which is now giving us the aeroplane. 



It must be assumed as a fact that the American people will not permit 

 subsidies beyond paying for a reasonable amount of work actually done in 

 carrying the mails, nor will they allow the wages for American sailors and 

 officers to be cut down. These are fixed facts against which it is useless to 

 protest. Nor is there in my judgment any panacea available or any scheme 

 for getting prosperous quickly. The work must go on step by step. An 

 excessive conservatism must be abandoned. It will hardly do to continue 



