try once of
vastly greater importance to our people than all shipbuilding has
been, is now, or ever can be, is a business that Congress by its
supine neglect has deliberately thrown into the hands of Europeans,
and sacrificed American shipowners at the instigation of American
shipbuilders.

In face of the prosperity achieved in consequences of the abandonment
of a ruinous system by other nations, in face of the lamentable
decadence its maintenance has brought upon ourselves, we still persist
in packing this Sindbad of prohibition, the worst offspring of
protection, upon our back, and then we wonder that we alone make no
progress!

Certain political economists are in the habit of raking up records of
the past wherewith to justify their theories for the present age. They
tell us of England's protective laws in Cromwell's time, and say that
as by them she then established her mercantile marine, we should
endeavor to regain what we have lost, by a return to the policy of
that period, from which by the by, we have varied only in a small
degree. Upon the same principle we should abandon steam, which, like
the progress made by our competitors, in free trade, is merely another
improvement in the train of advancing civilization. When such men talk
of the steamship enterprises which have triumphed in spite of their
antediluvian ideas, they tell us that England supported the Cunard
line by subsidies, and thus put her shipbuilding on a firm basis.
The inference is that we should go back to 1840, build some 1200 ton
wooden paddle steamers and subsidize them.

That this is no idle supposition is shown by the fact that long after
England had abandoned that class of vessels in favor of iron screw
steamships, we did build and subsidize the unwieldly tubs, some of
which are still in the employment of the Pacific Mail Steamship
Company. We became the laughing stock of the rest of the world who
classed us with the Chinese, and our steamships with Chinese junks.
The Japanese just emerged from barbarism exceeded us in enterprise.

They now own one line of fifty-seven steamships, more of them engaged
in foreign trade than all the steamships we thus employ upon the
ocean! At a late day we did commence the use of iron screw steamships
of such description and at such cost as one or two domestic ship-yards
chose to supply, and thus we were as far from resisting competition
as ever.

Now, if there was no ocean traffic of which we should be