decide upon. We all want to get back to some such laws as were put on our statute books in 1789 by Washington, Madison and Jefferson, at a time when our ships carried but 23 per cent. of our exports and imports, and which laws by 1800 had already raised that percentage to 89 per cent., and by 1810 to 91½ per cent., at the same time giving us a merchant marine that won for us the war of 1812. In 1828, when we were carrying 89 per cent. of our trade, the agricultural south and west combined against the shipping interests of New England and passed the Reciprocity Act of 1828, opening our trade to foreign competition, whereupon there at once began a loss which has now shrunk our total down to a paltry and shameful 8 per cent. A democratic southern President, Polk, seeing the success of English subsidies in the then new steamship trade, followed their example and soon our success in steamships was rivaling our earlier success in clipper-built ships, but the bitter sectional quarrel between south and north in 1856 caused the southerners in Congress, led by Jefferson Davis, to strike a blow at the shipbuilding north by repealing the mail subsidies. It succeeded. Thank God that quarrel and its cause no longer exist.
To-day the cotton-growing south and the grain-growing west are as alive as the northeastern seaboard to the need for freeing our merchant marine from the meshes of the net that is strangling it.
Everybody wants our merchant marine assisted—it was promised by all parties in the campaign of 1912. What happened after the election? The democratic party in control of both branches of the Congress and of the executive enacted the tariff law of October 3, 1913, and in it put a section granting 5 per cent. reduction in duties to goods carried in American bottoms. Sundry foreign governments promptly filed protests with the State Department. These foreign governments had long been planning to prevent any return by us to the laws which succeeded so brilliantly in the early days of our republic. Thanks to certain secretaries of state more eager to perpetuate their names on treaties than to learn the history and policy of their department, those foreigners succeeded in weaving a web of treaties which in the opinion of the Attorney General of the United States (rendered October 31, 1913, to the Secretary of the Treasury), nullified all that part of the act which attempted to assist our merchant marine. And that was the end of it? No, it was only the end of that chapter, for the people of the United States waked up for the first time to the fact that constant vigilance must henceforth be given to what contracts our State Department makes with foreign powers. We now insist on knowing if good bargains are being made for us, so flagrantly have many of our diplomatists been outwitted in the past, as witness this mesh of treaties that seem to leave us powerless to do what Washington, Madison and Jefferson did in 1789.
