The later chapters of this history of the American merchant marine have had much to say, necessarily, of the policy of shipping subsidies. This is a factor of undeniable importance. It is the firm belief of the practical ship merchants of the United States that a subsidy in some form is indispensable to the prompt restoration of our almost lost trade of deep-sea carrying. It would, however, be a grave error to assume that because a subsidy policy is important, it is all-sufficient. It is at its best only one favorable influence, with which other favorable influences must coincide in order to make the upbuilding of our merchant marine quick and certain. National aid to shipping by subsidy is potent, but it is not omnipotent. If it had not been withdrawn in 1858 by what was virtually a political crime, we should have saved our fine steam fleet on the North Atlantic even through the storm of the Civil War. If, however, a subsidy policy had been re-established in 1868 or 1870, after the lapse of a decade, it would undoubtedly have disappointed its sanguine champions. For the other essential factors in the problem were not favorable. It was (in 1870 and onward) an era of railroad building and not of shipbuilding. The energies and the money of the nation were absorbed by the urgent demands of home development. The American people had turned their eyes from the sea and were facing inward toward the marvellous riches of their empire of the West. No national legislation, however liberal or however strenuous, could have caused American shipping to spread and increase between 1865 and 1890. The most that could have been accomplished would have been to save it from the swift and terrible decline that was the heavy price of our actual national policy of neglect and discouragement. Now, however, all the circumstances are far more propitious. The keynote of the present is no longer domestic development but commercial expansion. The eyes of the nation are once more turning outward to the sea. Our railroads are built; our house is set in order. Enterprise and wealth are available for that ocean adventure in which the Americans of the first half of the nineteenth century so conspicuously excelled the less bold and tenacious merchants and mariners of Europe. It is profoundly significant that the greatest shipping enterprise which the world has ever known is the work of American capital. Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan's purchase of the Leyland line of Atlantic steamers, and then his startling combination of this and several other British concerns with the International Navigation Company, has shocked Europe almost like a declaration of war. Yet this mighty stroke of financial statesmanship has had no immediate effect in increasing American tonnage. Only four of the hundred or more vessels in the Morgan combination hold a United States registry, the four American transatlantic liners, " St. Louis, ""St. Paul," "New York," and " Philadelphia.” The others fly a foreign flag and are at the beck and call of a foreign government. The American people are interested in and delighted by Mr. Morgan's vast undertaking, but they are not satisfied that American money and financial skill should thus go merely to the upbuilding of alien sea-power. Nor in all probability are Mr. Morgan himself and his associates. It is likely that their full plan, their final purpose, has not yet been disclosed. Following is the official record of the tonnage and foreign commerce of the United States, and the proportion carried in American vessels from 1891 to the present time: Not by large American investment in European shipyards or in foreign steamship lines is the American merchant marine to be re-created. That was not the policy of the fathers; it cannot be the policy of the sons. The preceding pages have shown that the great, prosperous, and glorious commercial fleet of the first half-century of the republic owed its birth and growth to the utilization of native ingenuity and enterprise. The famous Yankee packets, the clippers, and the mail ships were American through and through. When the United States launches its new fleet and reaches out for the mastery of the sea which is its rightful destiny and heritage, its new ships will surely be found to be distinctively American in design and in construction. Here and there expediency may justify the naturalization of another Paris or New York, but the shrewd American mind will always insist that this shall be the exception and not the rule, -recognizing that every merchant vessel built by our own mechanics of our own materials in our own yards means a strengthening of the productive power of this nation and a lessening of the cost of American tonnage, while every merchant vessel purchased abroad means a gain to the shipyard capacity and efficiency of our antagonist. The American merchant marine in foreign commerce will revive when the American people demand it. Economic conditions are quietly shaping themselves now to make this revival easy and certain, but it can be hastened by an aroused patriotic sentiment, and postponed by a lack of it. Germany has lately given to the world a noble example of the swift creation of maritime power in response to an ardent national aspiration, and Germany has a scant foothold on the deep sea, and none of the splendid nautical traditions of America. What the empire has done, the republic can do more readily, if it will. The same indomitable spirit which wrought our great railway system, subdued the Western wilderness, and is now driving the surplus output of our industries into all the markets of the world, can win supremacy on the ocean for the United States just as soon as it learns that it is worth while to make the endeavor. The present exclusion of America from the deep sea is only for a time, and now for a brief time. No race like ours with a grasp upon two oceans and the mingled blood of Viking and pioneer can long be cheated of its birthright. THE END |