rs have been restricted to the construction of
warships, coasters, and yachts. National pride has naturally demanded that
all vessels for the navy be built in American shipyards, and a federal law
has long restricted the trade between ports of the United States to ships
built here. The lake shipping, too--prodigious in numbers and activity--is
purely American. But until within a few years the American flag had almost
disappeared from vessels engaged in international trade. Americans in many
instances are the owners of ships flying the British flag, for the United
States laws deny American registry--which is to a ship what citizenship is
to a man--to vessels built abroad. While the result of this attempt to
protect American shipyards has been to drive our flag from the ocean,
there are indications now that our shipyards are prepared to build as
cheaply as others, and that the flag will again figure on the high seas.

Popular history has ascribed to Robert Fulton the honor of building and
navigating the first steamboat. Like claims to priority in many other
inventions, this one is strenuously contested. Two years before Fulton's
"Clermont" appeared on the Hudson, John Stevens, of Hoboken, built a
steamboat propelled by a screw, the model of which is still in the Stevens
Polytechnic Institute. Earlier still, John Fitch, of Pennsylvania, had
made a steamboat, and urged it upon Franklin, upon Washington, and upon
the American Philosophical Society without success; tried it then with the
Spanish minister, and was offered a subsidy by the King of Spain for the
exclusive right to the invention. Being a patriotic American, Fitch
refused. "My invention must be first for my own country and then for all
the world," said he. But later, after failing to reap any profit from his
discover and finding himself deprived even of the honor of first
invention, he wrote bitterly in 1792:

"The strange ideas I had at that time of serving my country, without the
least suspicion that my only reward would be contempt and opprobrious
names! To refuse the offer of the Spanish nation was the act of a
blockhead of which I should not be guilty again."

Indeed Fitch's fortune was hard. His invention was a work of the purest
originality. He was unread, uneducated, and had never so much as heard of
a steam-engine when the idea of propelling boats by steam came to him.
After repeated rebuffs--the lot of every inventor--he at length secured
from the State