t ready to fight. He watched them build huge
navies and grant heavy subsidies to their fast growing merchant fleets,
send vessels by thousands over the seas. He saw their shipowners draw
swiftly together in great corporations. Here was an age for immense
adventures in this growing trade of the world. To wait, to hold on
grimly, to keep up the fight at Washington for that miracle, Protection,
which would start the boom. To see the shipping yards teeming again with
the building of ships by the hundreds and thousands, to see them go out
again over the seas with our flag at the mast and our sailors below. To
feel the new call go over the nation--"Young men, come east and west,
come out! The first place on the oceans can still be yours!" This was my
father's great idea.

Ship subsidies and battleships, discriminating tariffs. What a religion.
But it was his. Of the miracles these things would work my father was
more sure than of a god in heaven. For he had thought very little about
a god, and all his life he had thought about this. For this he had spent
at least half his wealth on the congressmen that he despised. Bribery?
Yes. But for a religion.

"Go all around South America and to the Far East," he told me. "And
you'll see the flags at sea of England, Germany, Austria, France, of
Russia, Norway, Spain, Japan. But if you see the American flag you'll
see it waved by a little girl from the deck of a British liner. This
means that we are losing in marine freights and foreign trade billions
of dollars every year. And it means more and worse than that. For it's
ship building and ship sailing that take a nation's men out of their
ruts, whip up their minds and imaginations, make 'em broad as the seven
seas. And we've lost all that, we've thrown it away, to breed a race of
farmers--of factory hands and miners and anarchists in slums. We've
built a nation of high finance--and graft--and a rising angry mob. But
sooner or later, boy, this country will wake up to what it has done. And
with our grip on both oceans and the blood we've still got in our veins,
we'll reach out and take what is ours--as soon as we're ready to fight
for it hard--the mastery of the ocean world!"

For this idea he had lived his life. For this he had neglected his
business, for this he had lost favor with the usurping foreign
ships--until his dock and his warehouse were often idle for weeks at a
time.

And the very bigness of things, the era of big companie