build them dear at the same time. If we are to buy, we are not to build. A free-ship act would therefore prove, what it is apparently intended to be, a deadly blow to shipbuilding in the United States. It is certain that such a blow to shipbuilding here is just the one that would be acceptable in England. Is it the least uncertain that our misguided politicians mean to give this blow? be Value of our Present Shipbuilding Industry. It may inquired, What will it cost to lose this trade? In other words, Is its value so much that it is worth retaining by protection? During the fiscal year of 1891 the vessels built and documented were as follows: Thus it appears the value of shipyard production is nearly $30,000,000 annually. Under a free-ship act, about three fourths of this output could be imported, and that the costliest part of it. Our present production might be cut down soon to less than $5,000,000, annually; and, erelong, to less and less, as foreigners worked into our trade. What shall we Exchange for Tonnage? Suppose it settled, that we shall import annually twenty-five millions in value of tonnage, shall we pay for it with goods, or gold? If with value of bacon products exported. If with value of beef (canned and fresh) exported. If with value of iron and steel manufactures exported If with value of flour exported. It would seem from the way gold went abroad in 1891, there being $86,362,654 exported, and but $18,232,567 imported, that it is a foolish proposal, from a financial point of view, to quit building our own vessels and go to importing them, no matter in what commodity pay may be made. We are not now building half the tonnage that we should use ourselves upon the sea. Already, the best part of shipbuilding for our trade is in the hands of rivals, and we are paying annually a heavy tribute for our privation. We lost this building by staking it upon the application and fair working of a one-sided "freetrade" principle, and now the proposition is to repeat that disastrous experience as to all our output of tonnage. The consequence of such a measure may be easily shown. Foreign Possession of our Domestic Trade. The surrender of our coasting and lake trades is the inevitable result of a successful free-ship bill. With a foreign building will come a foreign owning of the vessels in our domestic as well as foreign trade. The way is easy and natural. It is the shipbuilding interest, quite as much as the shipowning, that puts tonnage afloat and pushes it into employment. Shipowning goes with shipbuilding. British shipowning is under every flag where it wants to follow sales of British tonnage. It flourishes in France under the protection of the bounty system, from the circumstance that foreign-built ships were admitted to its benefits, contrary to prudence. It is even now in our own country under various guises. There are corporations with American officers, whose entire stock, nearly, belongs to British corporations, our law allowing the president and secretary of an American corporation, if citizens, to register vessels. This corporate ownership and registry may be extended to sail as well as steam vessels, and to fleets as well as single craft. Many single vessels are owned in Great Britain by corporations. Other means of fraud on our registry laws exist. Our registry laws are too lax. It is morally certain, there are vessels now in our domestic trade that are owned more or less by aliens, sailing under papers taken out by relatives or business partners of native or naturalized citizenship. Now, the restriction of registry to American-built vessels prevents a wholesale entrance of foreigners as owners. But, once admit foreignbuilt vessels to general registry, and alien ownership will come with whole fleets of craft, sail and steam. By means of bills of sale and mortgages, foreigners could safely trust, even strangers among our citizens, to cover their property for a small interest in it. Under such circumstances, and the passage of a free-ship bill, prices for Canadian and British tonnage would appreciate. Our own people, having now all the tonnage they need, would have no call to buy abroad, and the consequence of the situation would be the overcrowding of our ports with tonnage, some of it idle much of the time. Freights would fall. Our coasting and lake business might be demoralized in a single year, and our own people could not fail to be the losers in the end, and that shortly. Before long, our citizens would have to give up the domestic, as they have been obliged to quit the foreign trade. An alien interest would succeed a native. A foreign, disloyal, inferior service would take the place of what is now national, advantageous, and profitable. Here it may be asked, What general good would be accomplished for the country, by the changes which would surely follow the free importation of vessels? Has any good grown out of the "maritime-reciprocity" acts and treaties which have given our foreign trade into the hands of rivals and enemies? Are the statesmen of the Republic giving attention to the consequences of breaking up American power on the sea? What can they substitute for that power in the day of need? One inventive American shipbuilder, one enterprising American shipowner carrying on his business, is of greater use to the country, gives it more strength, adds more to its independence and its fame, than thousands of some other citizens. What is a free-ship proposition to the people of the United States? It is abandonment of the sea, and nothing else. There is folly in every feature of it. To quit building ships ourselves and buy from the British flag is to go under that flag on our ocean domain. It is to repudiate our own banner every time a ship is launched for use in our trade. Having to go to Canada or Great Britain to see the launch of an American ship-What delusion is in the thought! Jefferson Davis, and his compeers of secession memory, never put their hands on the American ship in the domestic trade. They cut off subsidies in the foreign trade; they could have passed a free-ship bill; they could have opened the coasting trade; but they were too American. A decent self-respect, pride in the land of their birth, in the time of bitterest politics, kept the hands of Southern statesmen off the shipyards of the North. Strange it is, that it should be left to the present time of sectional peace for pygmies to strike the blow that giants scorned to deliver. CHAPTER XII. THE UNITY OF INTEREST IN SHIPBUILDING AND SHIPOWNING. THE friends of "free-ships" have sought to divide the shipping interest into two antagonistic parts, shipowning and shipbuilding, and to prejudice the country against the men who carry on the latter business. It is alleged that shipbuilding is a "protected industry," therefore a "monopoly," and responsible, through high prices, for the ruin of shipowning. But as the same sophists assert that shipbuilding has been "protected 'to death," this doctrinal proposition cannot be true. It has been shown, Chapter V., that shipowning in the domestic trade has flourished, but in the foreign trade has perished; and, needless to say, the shipbuilders have been the same for both trades. Only one kind of owning and building has suffered, and that is found in the unprotected foreign trade. It has been shown in Chapter VII., that shipping in the foreign trade flourished along with that in domestic trade, while both kinds of tonnage had protection. In Chapters VIII. and IX. it is fully established that decline and decay of our foreign-trade marine set in, continued, and effected their work under onesided reciprocity and inequitable free trade. Shipowners, as a body, never gave countenance to sophistical arguments of any kind for stripping protection from shipbuilding, because they knew what was needed was employment for tonnage, not cheap ships, but good ones, and plenty of work for them to do. American shipowners, ever since the war, have found the tonnage which they used to be altogether too cheap for profit. They have sold it freely at bargain prices, and quit buying at any price, except for the protected domestic trade. Only a few of them have ever thought they could see even a personal advantage in purchasing vessels abroad, while none have pretended that the national interest would be served by giving up the substance of shipbuilding for the shadow of ship |