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Show THE DEMOCRACY AND AMERICAN SHIPPING In his speech in St. Louis Hon. Champ Clark brought up the statement that in 18G0 the merchant mer-chant tonnage of the United States was nearly equal to that of Great Britain. He cited that as a sample of how American shipping flourished after nearly sixty yeais of Democratic rule. How paltry is all such talk. An old law prevents pre-vents foreign ships from trading between American Ameri-can ports. Gold was discovered in California (3,000 miles from New York). Three hundred thousand people rushed to the now land. They had to be supplied with everything. The result was the building up ci a great fleet of clipper and half dipper ships. But even then our only lino ct steamers across the Atlantic was forced to the wall by that last Democratic administration shutting shut-ting off the subsidy that had made it possible to compete with the Cunarders. Then oame the war and the destruction of our merchant ships. When the war was over, the building of wooden ships had practically ceased and the invention of the compound marine engine, made it possible to carry freights cheaply In steamships. In the meantime, too, California had bBcome nearly self-supporting. From that day to this the Democratic party has tought subsidies for ships, though every important foreign ship that enters our ports is heavily subsidized. sub-sidized. Still a plank in the Democratic platform plat-form favors the building up of our merchant marine. ma-rine. Sunset Cox explained to his party what was needed, so did ex-Secretary of the Navy Herbert, Her-bert, but it is useless. The party is determined that it shall never be done, though this country pays annually to foreign ship owners sonj hundreds hun-dreds of millions of dollars, Still In convention the party favors "the building build-ing up of our merchant marine." The strange feature of the opposition to the shipping bill In the Democratic convention "was that the most marked opposition to It came from old-time silver men. From men who for years kept thundering the truth to the country that the, depression couid never be lifted until there could be a vast increase in the volume of money, and lopeating the questionless truth that as that volume vol-ume increased or decreased so prices would rise or fall. The volume of- the nation's foreign trade is something tremendous, and it is practically In the hands cf foreign ship owners. From passengers, from freight in carrying away what this country has to sell and In bringing in what this country purchases from abroad, they draw from this country coun-try $700,000,000 per annum. In ten years that amounts to more than all the gold in the world. Could that be saved to us it surely would be worth 4 per cent to this country, or twice what it is proposed to pay in subsidies. But in five years it would double the volume of metallic money in this country and that would double property prop-erty values. If the arguments of the silver men were sound ten years ago, this argument Is sound. And yils, too, leaves out all speculation as to what would be the result could the ships of thi-j new merchant marine that is to be, all be built and kept in repair by American artisans. All thlp I is lost sight of by our Democratic friends, their visions being narrowed to the fact that with the shipping bill passed, some men would invest their capital in ships with the hope of drawing a little' more interest than Is paid on government bonds. |