REPORT OF AMERICAN MERCHANT MARINE COMMISSION. 21
The chief motive of this time-honored policy of the founders of the
nation, as the references to it in Congress abundantly prove, was the
exact purpose of the present proposition—to create a sea militia, a
force of naval volunteers, brave and hardy men, inured to the ocean,
who should be prepared to defend the flag in war. History records
how gallantly these naval volunteers responded. The Constitution in
her later and most glorious cruises was manned largely by deep-sea
fishermen, who were found in the crew of every frigate and sloop of
war of 1812, and swarmed into the daring and effective privateers
of that ocean conflict. When the N avy was again recruited for the war
with Mexico, the deep-sea fisheries were again a ready source of the
best enlistments, and so many thousand fishermen joined the Federal
fleet in the civil war that the industry was well nigh abandoned—
shrinking from a tonnage of 204.197 in 1862 to 76.065 in 1867.
A NATIONAL INTEREST NOW.

At that time, and for many years before, the deep-sea fisheries were
not the genuinely national industry they have now become, when their
adventurous sails flash in the Gulf of Mexico and the far North Pacific.
Seybert in his ¢ Annals” (1818) declares: ‘Our fishermen have heen
almost exclusively confined to the New England States; of these
Massachusetts had the greatest share. * * * Ip the cod fishing,
no vessel (except 4844 tons returned for New Jersey in 1803 and 6638
tons for Virginia in 1796) was owned south of New York.” Yet until
the unhappy quarrel that preceded the civil war, this national encouragement
 from the Treasury of a naval reserve aroused no party or sectional
 opposition. The policy, founded under Washington. through
the counsel of Jefferson, stood under Madison and Jackson as well as
the younger Adams. That identical principle—indeed, that identical
method—with the sanction of three-quarters of a century upon it, is
now again evoked in the present bill for the creation of another force
of naval volunteers, applied anew to the deep-sea fisheries, and extended
to the kindred service of the mercantile marine for the fisheries are
Now t00 scant to provide alone the naval volunteers for a nation of
30.000,000 people.
FOR CARGO CARRIERS ESPECIALLY.

To the inevitable question, Will this naval subvention of $5 per
gross ton per annum, payable to a given vessel for no more than fen
years, suffice to solve the whole problem of our ocean shipping, creat-Ing
 not only a fleet of capacious and useful cargo ships, but a fleet of
fast and luxurious passenger ships?—to this question the Commission
will frankly reply that no such complete result is to be expected.
Regular mail liners of adequate speed on certain important routes are
Provided for in another way in another section. But this naval subvention
 of $5 per gross ton does effectually bridge the difference of
cost of construction and cost of maintenance, based on wages here
and abroad, so far as concerns the average freighting vessel, steam or
sail. To this extent it does equalize conditions, and thereby does give
our merchant ships a fair fighting chance again upon, the ocean.
. Take, for example, the actual case of a new steam freighter, a typcal
 cargo vessel, of 8.750 gross tons. Her fixed charges. based on