REPORT OF AMERICAN MERCHANT MARINE COMMISSION. 15
A WORLD-WIDE PRACTICE.

To sum up, therefore, it may be said that every nation possessing a
deep-sea merchant fleet of any real importance encourages and supports
this interest to the degree and in the way which its judgment, approves
or its national resources make possible. The most frequent form of
this national assistance is the mail subvention to regular lines. Great
Britain is the pioneer and chief exemplar in the policy of mail subventions.
 She began this practice on a large scale with the Cunard Line
in 1839-40, and since then has expended between two hundred and
fifty and three hundred million dollars in creating and sustaining her
mail lines to every great port and market on this planet. ’
It is sometimes urged by those who desire to believe that a consistent
 free-trade policy has been maintained by the British (Government
that these enormous British subventions were bestowed merely to carry
the colonial mails, with no purpose whatever to encourage British ocean
trade or navigation. But that this academic view is wholly superficial
and untenable is demonstrated by the British Government itself. A
report of the Parliamentary committee on contract packets in 1853 on
the Cunard and other subsidies thus speaks with authority as to the
actual purpose of these generous subventions: .
. The objects which appear to have led to the formation of these contracts, and to
the larger expenditures involved, were to afford us rapid, frequent, and punctual
Communications with distant ports which feed the main arteries of British conmerce,
 and with the most important of our foreign possessions, to foster maritime
enterprise and to encourage the production of a superior class of vessels, which would
Promote the convenience and wealth of the country in time of peace and assist in
defending its shores against hostile aggression.
TO NON-BRITISH PORTS,

Indeed, some of the heaviest British expenditures were not in the
colonial service at all, but for lines not only to the United States, but
to Colon, Brazil, and Argentina—in other words, to absolutely foreign
lands, At least one of the British subsidized companies—the Pacific
Steam Navigation—touched at no British port, but traversed the west
coast of South America. Lindsay, the historian of British shipping,
says of this enterprise, that was established by an American merchant
who first sought aid unsuccessfully at Washington:
. The extension of British influence and British commerce was doubtless the chief
inducement for supporting this communication between the Republics of New Granada,
 Bolivia, Peru, and Chile, the nature and extent of that traffic rendering it
necessary for the English to maintain mercantile establishments in the chief ports
and towns of the western coast of the Pacific, and thus justifying the Government in
gL this expense. (W. S. Lindsay, History of Merchant Shipping, Vol. IV,
RECENT BRITISH SUBVYENTIONS.

This fixed British practice of creating, by generous subvention,
steamship lines “for the extension of British influence and British
commerce” continues to the present time. The new Cunard contract,
involving the virtual gift of two great steamers with a subvention of
$1,100,000 a year, is a recent case in point. Another is the grant of
a $200,000 subvention for a new 14-knot steam line to the West Indies.
And still another—a little earlier—is the subvention of $291,000 to a
British line of three ships for a service from Vancouver, British