REPORT OF AMERICAN MERCHANT MARINE COMMISSION. 11

of officers and crew, and the higher cost, because more liberal variety
and quantity, of food on shipboard. The laws of the United States
require a scale of provisions the most generous in the world, and if
the Government scale is waived, as it may be by mutual agreement of
master and men, equally good food must be substituted. This, of
course, is all as it should be, and ‘must be in America, but wages and
maintenance are unquestionably a present factor to prevent American
ships from launching out into general and successful competition with
foreign flags.
The difference in wages and in style of living is not greater between
an American and a foreign ship than between un American and a foreign
 factory. But the higher wages of the American factory, and the
superior comforts required by its work people are, and long have
been, protected by tariff laws against the cheaper wages and the lower
standards of foreign lands. Here is the real heart of this whole question
 of the American merchant marine.

THE ONE UNPROTECTED INDUSTRY.

American shipping in the foreign trade has been for forty or fifty
years the only American industry exposed directly to foreign competition
 that has not been protected by the Government. There is no
need to look beyond this one sentence for an explanation of the hard
fact that this is the one American industry that has halted and shrunk
while all others have made prodigious increase. And yet this industry
was once almost the mightiest in America. The American merchant
fleet from 1800 to 1860 was the second in size and the most enterprising,
efficient, and profitable in existence. But throughout most of that
time 1t was a protected industry—protected at first by discriminating
duties and tonnage taxes, which were not com letely removed against
our most formidable rival until 1849; ho. later by the California
gold discovery and the Crimean war. When these factors lost their
power, as they did in 1855-56, there came the sharpest and most significant
 decline that American shipbuilding has ever suffered in the
half decade from 1855 to 1860.
When new and vigorous protection was applied by the National
legislation of 1861 and the subsequent years to American manufactur-Ing
 and land industries in general, the toilers of the sea. the enterprise
of our ocean merchants, were unconscionably forgotten by the National
Government.
HEAVILY BURDENED.

Not only were the shipowners and seamen forgotten in their bold
and hazardous industry, but heavy burdens were heaped upon them in
the war taxes, for which manufacturers gained compensation in the
protective tariff. The heavy blow struck by the war itself at our
merchant shipping is, of course, historic, but there were economic disadvantages
 scarcely less severe and more protracted. The American
shipowner who built a ship in the United States between 1865 and 1870
was in a position analagous to that of a manufacturer compelled to pay
heavy duties on his machinery and his materials, and yet absolutely
denied protection on the finished product of his industry. This finished
 product of the shipowner was his service, his transportation.
It is a vivid proof of the incomparable American genius for the sea