eteenth century the American commercial flag was rapidly
ousting the British flag from the seas. Even with a knowledge of the
facts, it is still hard for us to-day to comprehend.

So amazing was the growth of the mercantile marine of the young
republic--such qualities did the Americans show as shipbuilders, as
sailors, and as merchants--that in 1860, the American mercantile marine
was greater in tonnage and number of vessels than that of all other
nations of the world combined, except Great Britain, and almost equal to
that of Great Britain herself. These were of course the days of glory of
the American clipper. It appeared then inevitable that in a few years
the Stars and Stripes--a flag but little more than half a century
old--would be the first commercial flag of the world; and but for the
outbreak of the Civil War, it is at least probable that by now
Englishmen would have grown accustomed to recognising that not they but
another people were the real lords of the ocean's commerce. When the
Civil War broke out, the tonnage of American registered vessels was
something over five and one-half millions; and when the war closed it
was practically non-existent. The North was able to draw from its
merchant service for the purposes of war no fewer than six hundred
vessels of an aggregate tonnage of over a million and carrying seventy
thousand men. Those ships and men went a long way towards turning the
tide of victory to the North; but when peace was made the American
commercial flag had disappeared from the seas.

It would be out of place here to go into a statement of the causes which
co-operated with the substitution of iron for wood in shipbuilding to
make it hard at first for America to regain her lost position, or into a
discussion of the incomprehensible apathy (incomprehensible if one did
not know the ways of American legislation) which successive Congresses
have shown in the matter.

A year or so back, the nation seemed to have made up its mind in earnest
to take hold of the problem of the restoration of its commercial marine;
but the defeat in the early part of 1907 of the Ship Subsidies Bill left
the situation much where it was when President Grant, President
Harrison, and President McKinley, in turn, attempted to arouse Congress
to the necessity of action; except that with the passage of time
conditions only become worse and reform necessarily more difficult. The
Ship Subsidies Bill was defeated largely by the v