ir capacity.
Yards that began, like the Cramps, building United States warships and
finding little other work, were soon under contract to build men-of-war
for Russia and Japan. The interest of the people in the navy afforded a
great stimulus to shipbuilding. It is told of one of the principal yards,
that its promotor went to Washington with a bid for naval construction in
his pocket, but without either a shipyard or capital wherewith to build
one. He secured a contract for two ships, and capital readily interested
itself in his project. When that contract is out of the way the yard will
enter the business of building merchant vessels, just as several yards,
which long had their only support from naval contracts, are now doing.
There were built in the year ending June 30, 1901, in American yards, 112
vessels of over 1000 tons each, or a total of 311,778. Many of these were
lake vessels; some were wooden ships. Of modern steel steamers, built on
the seaboard, there were but sixteen. At the present moment there are
building in American yards, or contracted for, almost 255,325 tons of
steel steamships, to be launched within a year--or 89 vessels, more than
twice the output of any year in our history, and an impressive earnest for
the future. Nor is this rapid increase in the ship-building activity of
the United States accompanied by any reduction in the wages of the
American working men. Their high wages, of which ship-builders complain,
and in which everyone else rejoices, remain high. But it has been
demonstrated to the satisfaction, even of foreign observers, that the
highly-paid American labor is the most effective, and in the end the
cheapest. Our workingmen know how to use modern tools, to make compressed
air, steam, electricity do their work at every possible point, and while
the United States still ranks far below England as a ship-building center,
Englishmen, Germans, and Frenchmen are coming over here to learn how we
build the ships that we do build. If it has not yet been demonstrated that
we can build ships as cheaply as any other nation, we are so near the
point of demonstration, that it may be said to be expected momentarily.
With the cheapest iron in the world, we have at least succeeded in making
steel, the raw material of the modern ship, cheaper than it can be made
elsewhere, and that accomplished, our primacy in the matter of
ship-building is a matter of the immediate future. A picturesque
illustration of