IB

OCEAN MAIL SERVICE.
FRANCE.

Nothing has occurred in the past ten years to require a modification
 of the following extract from the report of the Bureau for 1899:

The efforts of France to increase her merchant marine have been out of proportion
 to the results attained. Uncertainty as to the course to be pursued by
the IPrench Government has done almost as much harm to French shipping as
indifference or inaction could have wrought. In 1866 France adopted the
“free-ship ” policy. After the Franco-Prussian war French shipbuilders objected
 to the policy, and in 1872 it was abandoned, and France adopted dis->riminating
 duties. Other nations, including the United States by proclamation
by President Grant, promptly retaliated, and the policy proved so injurious to
nll French interests that it was abandoned in 1873, after a little over a year's
axperience, and the ¢ free-ship ” policy, which has since been in operation, was
restored. In 1881 a complicated system of construction and navigation bounties
was adopted.
This in turn was followed by another construction and navigation
bounty law in 1893. Of that law it will suffice to say that it offered
to sail vessels a bounty of 3.2 cents per 100 nautical miles per ton,
sufficient to enable these vessels to sail at random about the seas withcut
 engaging in commerce and still pay dividends, while to steamships
 the bounty was only 2.1 cents. This attempt to change the
normal course of development of marine architecture naturally failed,
and although expenditures for shipbuilding bounties rose from
$400,000 in 1893 to nearly $1,800,000 in 1900, and for navigation
bounties from $1,200,000 to nearly $3,000,000 in the same period, the
French mercantile marine showed no proportionate increase. French
shipbuilders turned from the steamer, the natural instrument of
modern commerce by sea, and built sail vessels to get the bounty.
Some of the obviously ineffectual provisions of the law of 1893 were
changed by the law of April 7, 1902, which fixed at 150,000,000 francs
($28,960,000) the maximum expenditures for navigation and operating
 bounties for the ten years’ life of the act. This law of 1902 was
again changed by the law of April 19, 1906, which was to be effective
for ten years, and is in force at the present writing. The law of 1906
provides a shipbuilding bounty of 145 francs ($28) per gross ton for
steel steamships and $18.33 for steel sail vessels; for wooden steamers
over 150 tons $7.72, and for wooden sail vessels $5.80. These bounties
are gradually reduced until the highest is lowered to $19.30 in 1916,
and the others proportionately. The shipowners’ bounty (compensation
 d’armement) allows graded rates for each day a vessel is in commission.
 For a steel steamship the allowance is 4 centimes (100
centimes=19.3 cents) for each gross ton up to 8,000; for each ton from
3,000 to 6,000, 8 centimes; and for each ton over 6,000, 2 centimes. A
10,000-ton steel steamer would thus be paid $56 daily. The bounty
for sail vessels is 1 centime less. To get this bounty a 14-knot steamer
between the shipment and discharge of its crew must average daily
90 miles, and a sail vessel 85 miles.
Shipowners drawing bounties under the act of 1902 may remain
under that act or change to the act of 1906. The payment of all
these bounties, of course, is subject to numerous qualifications and
requirements; thus, the shipbuilding bounty is paid only when 90
per cent of the workmen are French.
Shipbuilding bounties are limited to 50,000,000 francs, shipowners’
bounties to 150,000,000 francs, or in all $38,600,000. The French