12 REPORT OF AMERICAN MERCHANT MARINE COMMISSION.

and its affairs that several hundred thousand tons of American shipping
have survived until to-day an economic blunder that would have long
since driven a manufacturing industry to utter bankruptey and dissolution.


A FLOATING FACTORY.

The American merchant ship is essentially a floating factory. It is
built and maintained at the American wage rate; but there is this vital
difference, that, while land factories are covered by national protection
averaging almost 50 per cent, these floating factories, the few that are
left, work up and down the ocean without any protection whatever,
save that granted to a few steam lines by the postal subventions of
the law of 1891.
These American ships, it is true, can secure their labor where they
will. Our navigation laws, almost the laxest in the world in this
respect, merely require that, except on mail ships only, the captain
and the officers of deck and engine room need be American citizens.
But because an American ship fits out and begins her voyage in the
United States she naturally secures her crew there, and pays the high
wages of her flag and port. Her foreign competitors, on the other hand,
fit out and secure their crews at their home ports, where wages are
adjusted to local conditions, and supply here only the waste of casualty
or desertion.
The handicap of wages against the American ship, as the testimony
before the commission demonstrates, ranges from 30 to 60 per cent,
except on the Pacific, where rates for white crews in the coast trade
are almost the highest in the world, and regular American liners to
the Orient employ Asiatic seamen and firemen.
The American sailor, native or naturalized, an able-bodied, hardy,
courageous man of peculiar value in the stress of war, would seem to
be at least equally as deserving of the consideration of his Government
 as the worker in a cotton factory, and it is not apparent why a
tin-plate rolling or dipping mill- should be more important to the
United States than a great shipyard equipped to build not only merchantmen,
 but battle ships and eruisers.
THE CASE OF THE SEAMEN.

One essential clause of the bill creating the Merchant Marine Commission
 directed it to ascertain *“what change or changes, if any,
should be made in existing laws relating to the treatment, comfort,
and safety of seamen, in order to make more attractive the seafaring
calling in the American merchant service.” Without this a merchantmarine
 inquiry would, of course, be incomplete, for, as a sailor-author
has well said, there can be no upbuilding of American shipping which
neglects the personal equation. After all, it is the officers, the men,
and the boys that make up the soul of the ship, which is so much
inanimate wood or steel without them.
Authorized representatives of the seamen have been heard by the
Commission on the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Gulf of Mexico.
They have had a conspicuous part in almost every meeting, and their
evidence is fully set forth in the published volumes. Asa rule, this
testimony is to the effect that general conditions of life in the Ameri-