ADDRESS OF HON. WILI.IAM C. REDFlEIvD. 393 



the process by which within a month an apparatus has been required for a 

 ship which took 700 cubic feet, weighing 3,800 pounds, while the same 

 manufacturer who furnished it was ready to supply an apparatus taking 200 

 cubic feet and weighing 1,800 pounds, which was more efficient and which 

 had been tried upon hundreds of ships. This sort of thinking must mean 

 and ought to mean loss. 



While time is, as has been said, essential to any permanent develop- 

 ment, it is also true that in this profession as in others it is a good rule to do 

 unto the other fellow as he wants to do unto you and to do it first. 



May I sum up briefly. The cost of construction in this country has 

 been and is being reduced. From certain circumstances it is little greater 

 to-day then it is abroad. The labor and victual cost of operating cannot be 

 reduced in rate, but it may be reduced in proportion, both in the power of 

 the ship and of her cargo. Neither of these, it seems to me, can very much 

 longer stand in our way if we are prepared to match terminal facilities to the 

 goods we are to carry and ships to both. And, finally, unbelief is a costly 

 luxury. My grandfather was hustled out of the New York Produce Ex- 

 change because he said there would one day be a railroad to the Mississippi 

 River. I was told more than once that elevated railroads could never suc- 

 ceed in New York. There are still men who talk doubtfully about the mov- 

 ing platform, though it carried hundreds of thousands with perfect success 

 in Paris twelve years ago. There is hardly one of the great transforming 

 ideas with which we are now all familiar that had not to bear the brunt of 

 unbelief and ridicule. The Atlantic cable was a joke for years, and the first 

 subway built in New York was knocked about from banker to banker till 

 one was found with vision sufficient to take it up. 



The suggestions you have so patiently permitted me to make may be 

 valueless, but they are not so because they are different from anything now 

 known, nor are they so because in some way something may have been tried 

 in thatdirection and found unsuccessful. It is thenormal course of invention 

 that men succeed where others fail, and I have sufficient confidence in the 

 trained imagination of American engineers to believe as they have accom- 

 plished in mechanics and in electricity and in industry that which makes 

 them the equals of any, so they will not be found wanting in the successful 

 application of their thought to our merchant marine. 



