instead of to be ready for war.

This can be accomplished only by coalition with other states. We might begin with a Pan-American Federation. This would absorb and submerge the Monroe Doctrine, which at present is a source of irritation to Europe and of humiliation to South and Central America.

I would therefore wish that The Outlook adopt a forward, constructive platform; that it would advocate spending $250,000,000 a year, not on maintaining armament to perpetuate the present anarchy, but on advancing the cause of world federation. My cry would be: Millions for international government and not one cent for anarchy.

10. I believe Kant's "categorical imperative is the most intelligent statement of Christian morality-that I should act in the way I would wish all men everywhere to act. And I certainly believe that if every Christian would refuse to go to war, as I would, the world would be better off.

The

11. The whole war business is a fearful delusion, a blindness, and an insanity. truth is that the nation that will disarm will be unconquerable. To lay down our arms, to act justly, and to offer to arbitrate all differences, and, having done all, to rest our case with the public opinion of the world, would insure us against hostile invasion a thousand times better than battle-ships. We speak of "adequate defense." To spend a quadrillion dollars on armament, till every headland on the ocean bristled with huge guns, and every citizen was a soldier, would invite, not prevent, war. The more "invina nation, the surer its fall, as Greece, Rome, and Spain have shown us.

cible"

12. Faith is as needed nationally as individually. There is no salvation but by faith. If this or any nation will disarm, utterly exclude war from its programme, and trust to the justice of mankind, it will lead the world. No nation will dare attack it. To invade it would be piracy, not war. It is the lack of this faith that is the matter with us and with

Dr. Crane says:

13. Never in the history of nations has such amazing hypocrisy been known. The various rulers, professedly Christian, go to their respective churches and pray Christ's blessing upon their arms. If Christ's teaching and example mean anything, they mean exactly the opposite of war. His doctrine was kindness, forbearance, a refusal to appeal to physical force, and an utter reliance upon the spiritual forces of righteousness. And they pray to him to bless their violence, vanity, rapine, and assassination. The an

cients who sacrificed to Mars or Odin before the conflict were at least consistent. To pray to Jesus of Nazareth to bless war is unspeakable blasphemy.

14. No man's creed is of any value except he be willing to die for it. I am willing. In case we drift into war with some other nation I shall gladly go out, stand against the wall, and be shot as a coward and traitor for refusing to kill citizens of another geographical territory, for I shall then be dying for a high principle I believe in instead of for the unspeakable hell of war, which I do not believe in. Knowing that murder is expressly forbidden by the God I serve, knowing that my rulers might have settled the dispute some other way," knowing that the war was not voted upon by the democracy of which I am a member, hating with all my heart the jingo appeals to national egotism and race prejudice, striving to love my Mexican or Chinese neighbor as myself, believing that a Christly and gentlemanly attitude is as possible for my country as for myself, and being convinced that, had the United States spent onehalf the energy in promoting a federation of the world, a league of peace, or some other form of world government that it spent in military preparedness, it could not have fallen into war, I would lay down my life as cheerfully as ever any martyr in the Roman arena. If this be cowardice, let the militarists make the most of it!

Τ'

It doesn't matter very much to the United States that the only other state-owned fleet now being attempted-in western Australia -annually winds up with an enormous loss. Failures elsewhere do not count here. country has been doing successfully for a hundred years any number of things in which other countries have failed; but the one thing in which Uncle Sam has conspicuously failed is in the running of an ocean fleet. Before the outbreak of the war there were seldom more than eight ships under the American flag on the Atlantic, and less than a dozen on the Pacific. Other Americanowned ships did business under foreign flags.

A distinction should be marked between ocean and coastal shipping. From coastal shipping-port to port on the American. coast-foreign ships are excluded; and Uncle Sam's coastal fleet increased from almost three million tons vessel register in 1860 to almost seven million tons in 1914; but in ocean or foreign traffic developments have gone the other way-almost to the point of extinction for the United States flag. In 1914 of Uncle Sam's enormous four billions of foreign commerce United States ships carried only a little over eight per cent.

Nor does it matter very much to the American shipper what inside politics may be behind a merchant marine policy. The Southerner selling cotton at six cents-as he did in September-when the price was eighteen and twenty cents a pound in Germany, isn't especially excited by the rumor in shipping circles that big foreign lines with snips tied up at American wharfs contributed heavily to Tammany preceding November elections with a view to selling ships to Uncle Sam himself.

What the Southern shipper wants is ships,

not politics. If a private individual likes to buy those ships, whether they are German or British, and likes to risk capture owing to the Declaration of London, which clearly states that ships bought from belligerents within sixty days of the outbreak of hostilities cannot be regarded as neutral, then the American shipper has nothing to say. He doesn't want to see a shot fired across a ship owned by Uncle Sam; but he ships at the buyer's risk, and he wants-ships.

For a hundred years every fanciful kind of legislation regarding navigation has been passed on the subject of the American merchant marine-laws as to air space, hours of labor, wages, citizenship, leave ashore, deck crews, lifeboats, oil cargo, laws as to food, fodder, and fooleries; and half the laws passed have simply added barnacles to America's law-logged merchant marine. Instead of helping, the navigation laws have pretty nearly navigated the United States flag off the high seas; and what the American shipper wants is-ships.

He has been told that wages and cost of material and expensive operation, so much higher in the United States than in foreign countries-from forty to sixty per centprevent American ships competing against foreign carriers; but that argument is not very convincing. Wages, material, and general operation are higher in the United States than in foreign countries for steel and sewingmachines and motor cars and farm implements; but that has not prevented these American products from invading foreign markets and capturing foreign markets from low-wage competition.

Why, then, has Uncle Sam no ships engaged in foreign trade? This was the question the American shipper asked impotently when the war broke out. In answer, the Administration changed the Ship Registry Law, permitting foreign-built vessels to come under the United States flag. Over a hundred vessels at the time of writing, 105bought or built abroad came under the United States flag; but there were some unexpectedly comical results. The Robert Dollar, from San Francisco, having brought 5,500,000 feet of lumber from British Co

ican wages.

lumbia to New London, was about to coal up at Norfolk for the Orient, when it loyally ran up the Stars and Stripes. At once the entire Chinese crew went on strike for AmerCrews contented with Chinese wages under a foreign flag suddenly demanded white man's wages under a United States flag. Winthrop Marvin, Secretary of the Roosevelt Marine Commission, relates a similar case of a United States Steel ship. When the flag was changed, the increase in wages in the engine-room alone was from $282 a month to $420. Loyalty came high. It pays during the war, when charter rates are high and risks to foreign carriers great; but after the war, when the foreign wage drops and the risks are over, will the change of the flag add one vessel to the merchant marine of this country?

For fifty years the United States has seen the thrifty nations of Europe grow rich on the pickings of American ocean traffic. Three hundred millions a year of tribute this country has paid in gold to Germany and England in cargo freight across the Atlantic on American commerce. Add to that two hundred and fifty million dollars a year-Sir George Paish's figures-spent by American. tourists in Europe, and those two amounts alone were sufficient to keep the balance of gold in Europe. Those two amounts alone -not counting the value of commerce purchases abroad-equaled a hundred million more than the world's gold production for a year. Was it any wonder that the end of every year saw a gold stringency in the United States-saw American gold transferred to German war chests and Bank of England vaults?

Yet till the war broke out the American public never really wakened up to realize what lack of ships meant. Why not let the other nation carry the freight? Why not, indeed?-when suddenly the war broke out, and the South saw itself beggared for lack of ships to carry its cotton. The South saw itself with the largest and best cotton crop in its history as completely cut off from the market as if beleaguered by men-of-war at every port. Till the outbreak of the war three of the leading cotton ports of the South had not shipped one bale of cotton under the American flag for ten years.

Hitherto the indifference of the Middle West in marine matters has been one of the greatest hindrances to the development of a merchant fleet by the United States. Con

gressmen from the Middle West have referred to Panama as a "mud puddle for lily pads." How has the war hit the Middle West? It, too, had one of the best cereal crops in its history. I was talking to a shrewd operator on the Chicago Board of Trade a week after the war broke out. He told me that if England lost control of the sea lanes he expected to see wheat down to sixty cents. For three weeks wheat was almost an embargo at Atlantic ports. When it became apparent that England could patrol the lanes of the sea, the embargo lifted; but when the blockade lifted it was found that rates had gone up on an aeroplane, above anything known to trade. Ship-owners well content with earnings of $5,000 before the war suddenly began earning $50,000 a month. Wheat, that had been at an ocean freight rate of four to five cents to Liverpool, suddenly jumped to seventeen and nineteen cents to Liverpool, and thirtysix cents to Rotterdam. Cotton, that had a cargo rate of twenty cents a hundredweight, now paid seventy-five cents, and has since mounted to three dollars. In places the ocean freight on cotton was almost as high as the market price per pound. Wheat from the Pacific coast went up to the rate of the old California gold days, $10 a ton.

When Mr. McAdoo in his Chicago address quoted the sudden jump of rates as reason for the Middle West supporting the Ship Purchase Bill, an indignant exporter wrote to the press begging the country "not to let him get away with that; for the buyer paid the freight." What was it to us whether the grain rate were three cents or thirty cents, the cotton rate three cents or three dollars, if the buyer had to pay it? But does the buyer pay the freight? Is not that the real error beneath the indifference of the Middle West towards a merchant marine? I am sometimes an amateur farmer. I have relatives in the Far West who are amateur farmers in a larger way. We grow the same kind of wheat from the same kind of seed. The freight rate to my market is about six cents. The freight rate for them to the world markets is thirty-eight to forty-four cents a hundred. Where in ordinary years I receive $1.14 to $1.25, they receive 77 to 88 cents, the difference being the freight to those world markets, where the real values of world commodities are determined by supply and demand. We may think the buyer is paying the freight. In a sense, he is; but if the seller could eliminate the distance between himself and

the world market, he would receive that world price, which equals local price plus freight. When returns are made to Eastern farmers for cattle, for apples, for potatoes, the returns are market price minus freight. The producer, as he knows to his sorrow, pays all charges; else would he get $7 instead of $2.50 for his apples, and 28 to 32 cents instead of 11 to 13 for his veal.

Mr. McAdoo was sound enough in his arguments of high freight as an appeal to the Middle West for a merchant marine; but were those high freights the result of the war? His own figures refute him here. He showed how the gross tonnage of world merchant fleets was 45,400,000 tons, of which half was British, two per cent only American. Of this gross tonnage, war had incapacitated 5,803,014 tons-that is, Austrian and German lines had been destroyed or run off the sea to the value of three and a half million tons. British tonnage had been withdrawn for Admiralty purposes to the extent of 1,700,000 tons; and there had been destroyed besides nearly half a million The war had lessened the ocean carrier space by twelve per cent; but the increase of ocean rates was not twelve per cent. was a thousand per cent. The figures did not jibe as an argument, though they startled the Middle West awake. An old sea captain of the Horn explained the situation to me. "It is not that cargo space is short. It's the mined seas, and the risk, and the high insurance, and, most of all, the plain fact that ship-owners know American shippers haven't American ships. Prices for United States wheat and cotton are high; and the foreigners are soakin' it to us."

It

Before the war began Panama had revived the interest of the most hidebound inlander in merchant marine matters. What was the use of building a four-hundredmillion-dollar canal if only foreigners were to reap the advantage? Just when the Mexican revolution disabled the Tehuantepec route Panama opened. When Pacific coast lumber began coming round in unbroken bulk up the Hudson, up the Sound, to inland points at a rate cheaper than rail as 1 to 3, East and West awakened to a realization of

what water traffic might mean. Ships driven from unsafe seas by the war began offering for cargo by Panama. Russia put on a line from Vladivostok. At the time of writing fifty-nine different vessels of regular lines have taken to the Panama route.

If you examine the cargoes of these new lines through Panama, the sudden transition from rail to water takes on deeper meaning. A Luckenbach vessel brought a cargo of products from Yuma, Arizona, to New York. The Robert Dollar and the AmericanHawaiian are both bringing Pacific coast lumber; but most significant of all, lying on the American-Hawaiian docks at the Bush Terminals are St. Paul goods booked to California by Panama. Do you take in what that means? St. Paul is the very hub of that Middle West which has thought that a merchant marine did not matter; and St. Paul goods come half-way across the continent to go to California by New York and Panama, and find it $5 a ton cheaper than straight west by rail. The thing is small; but it marks a revolution in the attitude of the inland mind to marine interests. Similar cases could be given of goods from Indiana, and even Missouri, going West by way of New York and Panama. The thing seems incredible; but, if you doubt it, write to the American-Hawaiian Steamship Company for a list of the goods they bill through Panama.

If anything more were required to drive home to the inland mind the need of the whole country for a merchant marine; the need to act as a unit to build up a merchant marine, then the relation of South America to unemployment supplies the clinch.

What connection has South America with unemployment? When the war broke out, why did factories for everything but armaments and clothing suddenly close in the United States? Because manufacturers saw their markets in Europe shut off certainly during the war, and afterwards perhaps for a long period of reconstruction. Now the war not only shut off those markets to the United States, but it prevented those fighting countries shipping their usual exports to South America. South America buys nearly $1,000,000,000 a year of those very things shut off to Europe from the United States and from Europe to South America by the war. did the United States not jump in and preempt these vacated South American markets? Because Uncle Sam had not the ships. There were lines aplenty running to South America from the United States, but, with the exception of four-which have come under the United States flag since the change in the Registry Law-all the other regular lines were under the flags of the warring nations.

Why

America's neutral commerce did not dare to risk these ships. This explains a seeming flat contradiction in the dispute over the Ship Purchase Bill. Friends of the bill declare that there are not ships for South American commerce. Enemies of the bill declare that ships to South America are going with empty cargo space. Both statements are true. The ships with empty cargo space are under the flags of the warring nations, and American shippers dare not risk sea raids. Ships under neutral flags, or under the American flag, such as those of United States Steel and United Fruit, have not gone to South and Central America with empty space. If the United States had had a fleet of merchantmen with their own docks and rail connections in South America, not a factory in the United States need have run half time, not an industrial worker need have gone unemployed.

High freight startled the South and the West out of their lethargy regarding a United States merchant marine. Panama traffic has awakened the Pacific. Grain grower, cotton planter, coastal shipper-all have been jolted into a realization of what lack of shipping means to a nation.

It remained for South America to touch the manufacturers and the industrial workers.

At the very time other nations are crippled in their merchant fleets Uncle Sam girds himself to the job of building a merchant fleet for himself. If he had set himself to the task a year ago, he would have found every section of the seven seas fenced off in "foreign pools," allied to fight competition with cutthroat " 'fighting ships," with rebates which are legal to foreign ships but are not to American ships, with traffic conferences that could freeze out and ruin a newcomer. But the war has changed all that. The foreign pools of Hamburg and London and Liverpool and Bremen have parted company in a war-mad ferocity. "The fighting fleet," to cut a competitor to pieces by lower rates, is rigged up for real fighting indeed; and it will be many a long year before Hamburg-American and Cunarder will meet in harmony on rebates and traffic conferences. For the first time since 1812 Uncle Sam finds the sea a fair field with no favors. His heavily subsidized competitors, who have jockeyed his flag off the sea for a century, are crippling themselves in a war game the end of which no man can see.

It is the opportunity of a century—of an

opening and new century latent with undreamed possibilities for the United States. Will the United States grasp it? The country has no desire-as Irving Bush, Chairman of the Marine Committee of the New York Chamber of Commerce, put it" to take hold of the hot end of a poker by buying international complications;" but suppose the Government did not buy the interned ships of belligerents (though that is exactly what Secretary Redfield declared in the National Trade Convention of St. Louis that the Government might do); suppose the Government built its own ships or bought from such neutral nations as Norway, are governmentowned ships the best solution? There is only one answer to the question, and that is fact.

The Government has owned and operated the Panama Line since 1903. The one and only guarantee of success to any marine is full cargoes inbound and outbound. Goternment business on Panama guaranteed this. The line carried no insurance. Mr. Redfield says its profits for the year ending June 30 were $314,000. What Mr. Redfield neglects to tell is that when you add up its total profits for eleven years, they average only two per cent on the capital. Now no investor will contradict that American-Hawaiian, Luckenbach, United Fruit, United States Steel, the Dollar vessels, the Pacific Coast lumber line, the coal lines now being planned on the Gulf for trade to Central and South America, could not operate one day on two per cent profits. Bondholders and shareholders would throw such investments to the winds. Private lines would be bucking Government competition that would throw them on the scrap heap. Friends of the bill declare that the amount proposed by the Government would buy at least sixty vessels. Thirty millions would be likely to buy less than forty vessels. Even so, sixty Government vessels would displace double their number of those privately operated lines which are now reducing freight as 3 to 1. Rivals of an American merchant marine-some American railways and nearly all foreign steamshipscould pray for hardly a better device to defeat Uncle Sam than a Government-owned line. If the supreme test of a marine policy be that it increase a nation's ships, the new policy promises nothing but disappointment.

At the very time that private capital, for the first time in a century, sees a chance of success in marine investment, at the very