To discuss the causes of our failure to hold our own in the carrying trade of the world may seem somewhat out of place, but the subject is so interesting in many ways that a few words may not be amiss.

The following is a comparative table showing the steam tonnage of the United States and of the British Empire, beginning with the year in which ocean steam navigation may be said to have been put fairly on its feet. Our own is divided into “oversea,” or that which can trade beyond United States waters, and “enrolled,” which includes all in home waters:

YearsUnited StatesTotalBritish
Empire
(including
Colonies)
OverseaEnrolled
18382,791190,632193,42382,716
18404,155198,184202,33995,807
18424,701224,960229,681118,930
18446,909265,270272,179125,675
18466,287341,606347,893144,784
184816,068411,823427,891168,087
185044,942481,005525,947187,631
185279,704563,536643,240227,306
185495,036581,571676,607326,484
1855115,045………
185689,715583,362673,077417,717
185878,027651,363729,390488,415
186097,269770,641500,144500,144

It will be seen from this table how great the extension of the use of the steamboat had been in the United States in these earlier years, as compared with that elsewhere. In 1852 our enrolled tonnage had grown to more than half a million tons, or well on to three times the whole of that of the British Empire, and our oversea tonnage was about one-third of that of Great Britain and her dependencies.

One reason for this very rapid increase in the enrolled tonnage was, of course, the fact that railroads had not yet begun to seam the West, as they were shortly to do: the steamboat was the great and absolutely necessary means of transport, and was to hold its prominence in this regard for some years yet to come. When this change came, there came with it a change in circumstances which went far beyond all other causes in removing our shipping from the great place it had occupied in the first half of this century. But great as was the effect worked by this change, there were certain minor causes which have to be taken into account. We had grown in maritime power through the events of the Napoleonic wars—which, though they worked ruin to many an unlucky owner, enriched many more—as we were for some years almost the only neutral bottoms afloat; we had rapidly increased this power during the succeeding forty years, during which time our ships were notably the finest models and the most ably commanded on the seas; the best blood of New England went into the service, and one has but to read the reports of the English parliamentary commissions upon the shipping subject to realize the proud position which our ships and, above all, our ships’ captains held in the carrying trade. We had entered the steam competition with an energy and ability that promised much, but we gave little or no heed to changes in construction until long after they had been accepted by the rest of the world; and it is to this conservatism, paradoxical as the expression may seem applied to our countrymen, that part of our misfortune was due.

The first of the changes we were so unwilling to accept was that from wood to iron; the other was that from paddle to screw. Even so late as the end of the decade 1860-70, while all the world else was building ships of iron, propelled by screws, some of which were driven by compound engines, our last remaining great company, the Pacific Mail, put afloat four magnificent failures (from the commercial point of view), differing scarcely in any point, except in size, from those of 1850-56. They were of wood, and had the typically national over-head beam engine. They were most comfortable and luxurious boats; but the sending them into the battle of commerce at such a date, was like pitting the old wooden three-decker with her sixty-four pounders against the active steel cruiser of to-day and her modern guns. Many of the iron screws built at the same time are still in active service; but the fine old China, America, Alaska, and Japan are long since gone, and with them much of the company’s success and fortune.

Of course, one great reason for this non-acceptance was the fact that, with us, wood for ship-building was still plentiful, and that it was cheaper so to build than to build in iron, to which material English builders were driven by an exact reversal of these conditions; and the retention of the paddle over the screw was due in a certain degree to the more frequent necessity of repair of wooden screw ships, to which it is not possible to give the necessary structural strength at the stern to withstand successfully the jarring action of the screw at high speeds.

The part in advancing the British commercial fleet played by the abrogation of the navigation laws, in 1849, which had their birth in the time of Cromwell (and to which we have held with such tenacity, as ours were modelled upon theirs), need only be barely mentioned. British ship-owners were in despair at the change, and many sold off their ship property to avoid what they expected to be the ruin of the shipping trade, but the change was only to remove the fetters which they had worn so long that they did not know them as such.

But the great and overwhelming cause, to which the effect of our navigation laws were even secondary, was the opening up of the vast region lying west of the earlier formed States; the building of our gigantic system of railways; the exploitation, in a word, of the great interior domain, of the possibilities of which, preceding 1850, we were only dimly conscious, and so much of which had only just been added by the results of the Mexican War. It is so difficult, from the present standpoint, to realize the mighty work which has been done on the American continent in this short space of forty years, that its true bearings on this subject are sometimes disregarded. The fact that the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, at this date, was not running its trains beyond Cumberland, Md., will give an impression of the vastness of the work which was done later.