REPORT OF AMERICAN MERCHANT MARINE COMMISSION. 73

told the Commission at Cleveland, Ohio, June 28, 1904, that the
United States Steel Corporation was selling great quantities of steel to
foreign shipbuilders, delivered at Belfast, at $24 a ton, while the price
charged at its Pittsburg mills was $32 a ton. Deducting $2 a ton for
ocean transportation and $1.40 for freight from Pittsburg to tidewater,
 the steel trust is selling steel to foreigners at $20.60 per ton
that it sells to Americans at $32. As Mr. Wallace said, * "That would
make $11.40 difference between the Pittsburg price to you and the
price abroad.” Mr. Wallace estimated that an 8,000-ton ship would
require about 3,500 tons of steel materials, and that the discrimination
of $8 per ton would make a difference of $28,000 in the cost of constructing
 this ship here or abroad. He said that about four years ago
his company built two ships for the American Navigation Company at
A price about equal to the price for which they could be built in England
 at that time. ‘Steel was then,” he said, ‘very much lower
than it is to-day. The steel pools had not then been formed.”
Mr. George W. Dickie, superintendent of the Union Iron Works,
the largest shipbuilding plant on the Pacific coast, stated to the Commission
 at San Francisco, that he was in a Scottish shipyard in 1900
when they were building a vessel almost exactly like one he was
building in his yards and he saw there materials unloaded from a ship
trom Now York furnished by Carnegie & Co. at about $13 a ton less
than he was paying for the sane material from the same mills.
A large number of others testified to the same effect. It can be seen
at once what an immense profit is gl to the steel trust by the operation
 of law alone. A tariff which enables manufacturers to reap a
bonus of from $10 to $15 a ton in addition to the legitimate profits is
indefensible from any standpoint of honesty and fair dealing, and one
of the first steps in the interest of shipbuilding in the United States
ought to be to put at least all materials which enter into the construction
 of ships on the free list no matter whether intended for the foreign
or domestic trade.
~The recent testimony, as well as the testimony given in former hearings,
 and the statements of experts made in newspapers and magazines
during the last ten years indicate that the cost of constructing ships in
American yards had, before the advent of Dingleyism and its brood
of cormorant trusts, gotten down to about the cost of constructing
ships in foreign yards. In the North American Review of January,
1892, Mr. Charles H. Cramp said that first-class ships could be huilt
in American yards at about the cost of building them in foreign yards.
His words were, * within as small a margin as would be likely to prevail
 in a similar case between any two British shipyards.”
In his testimony before the Merchant Marine Commission at Philadelphia
 on May 27, 1904, Mr. Edwin 8. Cramp said:
For these reasons, enumerated above, the cost of ships in America, which at the
time of the beginning of the McKinley Administration had approximated the cost of
the ships of a similar type by first-class builders in England within 10 or 15 ver cent.
to-day can not be produced within 40 ver cent.
_ In an article on the invasion of American goods in foreign market
in the Grande Review, quoted in Consular Reports. March 3, 1900.
Mr. George Wenlersse said:
To-day ships may be built at Bath, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Wilmington,
Dhester. and Newport News as cheaply as anywhere in the world.