REPORT OF AMERICAN MERCHANT MARINE COMMISSION. i
our foreign competitors, that Brazil goes hy our door and buys of
England and Germany.
The United States sent $13,000,000 worth of merchandise to Brazil
in 1394 and only $10,000,000 in 1903. Yet, having plenty of delivery
wagons of its own by sen and rail to Canada and Mexico, our country
has increased its exports to Canada from $31,000,000 in 1804 to
$116,000,000 in 1903, and to Mexico from 812,000,000 in 1894 to
$41,000,000 in 1903. The contrast is eloquent. There is no need
to look further for an explanation why European shipowners, leagued
with European manufacturers, are so insistent that the United States
should not go to the expense and trouble of providing transportation
facilities of its own in the trade to South America, Africa, and the
Orient.
OUR TRIBUTE TO FOREIGNERS.

It is a fair, accepted estimate, based on Sir Robert Giffen’s figures
for British ocean trade, that there is now being paid on the aver
age the enormous sum of $150,000.000 a year to foreign shipping
for the conveyance of our import and export freights, our mails,
our passengers. Only 10 per cent of our vast sea-borne commerce is
now carried by American ships. In 1810 the American proportion
was 91 per cent; as late as 1861 it was 65 per cent. We ought again
to be conveying at least two-thirds of our commerce beneath, our own
flag; our right to this share is impregnable.
An adequate American ocean fleet would mean the saving to this
country of $100,000,000 a vear which now goes to build up the commercial
 power and naval strength of Europe and Asia. For a time
it is true that the development of such a fleet would cost something,
hut all our economic experience goes to show that this increased
expense would be temporary, while the saving would be solid and permanent.
 American bridge makers and locomotive builders could not
compete with Europe in price in the early days of their industry, hut
now that they have developed standard types and attained a huge scale
of constant production, American bridge makers and locomotive build
ers, still paying good American wages, are able to meet their foreign
competitors in costand beat them in the excellence and adaptability of
their product. And what is a steamship but a locomotive and a stool
bridge wrought together?
A hundred million dollars a year, the amount that would eventually be
saved to the American people if their ocean shipping were developed as
their locomotive making and bridge making have been, is equivalent to
the entire cost of oursplendid Navy, or of our reorganized and strengthened
 Army, including the coast defenses. It is equivalent to four times
the annual interest on the National debt. It would furnish employent
 to tens of thousands of American workmen, and comfort to their
families, in the processes of ship construction and maintenance, from
the forest and mine to the rolling mill, forge, and shipyard.

FOREIGN IN EVERYTHING.

The foreign ships which now convey nine-tenths of our ocean commerce
 are invariably built abroad, oticered abroad, manned abroad,
repaired abroad. If they can possibly help it, they never use a pound