How?
By denying registry and the protection of the flag to any ship not built in one of our own shipyards. We are not allowed to buy vessels from England, Scotland or Germany without losing the protection of our government. We must build them at home. Our precious tariff increases the cost of all shipbuilding material, while in Great Britain vessels are built under free trade conditions. Hence it costs us more to build any sort of seagoing vessel than it costs Great Britain. If we were allowed to buy ships abroad we could get them on equal terms with British merchants. Consequently we could compete with them for the carrying trade. We would get our share. The American Merchant Marine would once more flourish as it did prior to the Civil War. The Tariff compels the merchant to pay more for an American ship than the Englishman pays for an English ship, and our Navigation laws compel the American merchant to use the American ship or none.
Result: The Englishman gets the business.
It was just this kind of legislation which provoked the preliminary troubles between Great Britain and the American Colonies. Our forefathers hated the British navigation acts; the sons copied them. Great Britain grew wise, swung to Free Trade, and took the seas away from us. Our navigation acts represent the most violent type of the Protective madness. To deny the merchant the right to buy his vessel where he can get it cheapest is mere lunacy. The cheapest and best ships will inevitably get the cargoes; and where the law denies to the American the chance to get the cheapest and best vessel it simply puts him out of the combat.
Our Navigation acts have done that identical thing.
What is the remedy? Senator Hanna wanted “ship subsidies.” In other words, the merchant was to be encouraged to go into the shipping business by the assurance that the Government would go down into the pockets of the taxpayers and pull out enough money to make good the difference between the costly ships of America and the cheaper, better ships of Great Britain.
To escape the effects of one bad law, Senator Hanna proposed that Congress should pass another. The Tariff, which plunders the many to enrich the few (see recent remarks of Parker and Cleveland), has killed the merchant marine; therefore the merchant marine must be restored to life, not at the expense of the enriched few, but of the plundered many.
The merchant marine has been destroyed by the system which is “the mother of the Trusts,” by the system which sells to foreign consumers at a lower price than to home consumers.
Why not encourage our merchant marine by allowing our merchants to buy their vessels in those foreign markets where our Protected Manufacturers sell their wares so much cheaper than they sell them to us at home?
Would it not be the most shameless kind of class legislation to take the tax money of the unprivileged masses of our people (who pay practically all the taxes), and build up fortunes for another class of privileged shipowners.