The Memoirs of Charles H. Cramp by Augustus C. Buell

Author:Augustus C. Buell [Buell, Augustus C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-05-02T16:00:00+00:00

The Americans were determined to own and operate ships. They would have preferred to run them under the American flag, but Congress—or rather a fraction in the House of Representatives—compelled them to use the British ensign! The commercial and financial effect of this was that the American investors got the benefit of the lower wages and cheaper subsistence of foreign seafaring labor. The vessels were American as to ownership only. No American officer or seaman or engineer or fireman was employed in them. They added nothing to the sea power of the country; they did nothing toward forming a nursery of American sailors to be in readiness for an emergency. On the contrary, they were a constant school for the Naval Reserve of a power that might become as hostile politically as she has been industrially and commercially from the beginning of our existence as an independent nation. None of these great facts appealed to the narrow and demagogic faction in the House. They could see in it nothing but “a trust,” and their parrot-cry resounded from the banks of the Wabash to the foot-hills of the Rocky Mountains.

Many men, hitherto hopeful, believe that any further effort to restore our foreign carrying trade under the American flag must be in vain. They argue that, if the Houses of Representatives elected in 1898 and 1900 would not pass a Shipping Bill, none can ever be chosen that will. If foreign influences and alien doctrines could prevent consideration in those two Houses of bills that had already passed the Senate in each Congress, those influences and those doctrines are likely to maintain their potency indefinitely. If this be true, the American flag in the foreign trade is doomed to utter extinction within a few years on the Atlantic Ocean, and its survival in the Pacific is a matter of extreme doubt.

A strange feature of this contest in its later stages was the fact that the confederated trades-unions of the country arranged themselves unanimously against the American and in favor of the alien policy. Trades-unionism is founded upon a doctrine or dogma of protection more sweeping and more drastic than any other ever known. They cheerfully maintain and sometimes exultantly proclaim that, when nothing else will serve to accomplish their ends, violence and crime become logical and legitimate instrumentalities for enforcement of their protective doctrine. They take no account of the fact that the enactment of a favorable shipping law would open new and wide avenues of remunerative employment for American mechanics that are now closed. Their motive in opposing such legislation seems to be a sort of blind, groping revenge against a few ship-builders and ship-owners who have resisted their unreasonable and ruinous demands. It is a remarkable fact that the leaders and managers of the confederated trades-unions are all foreigners.

Naturally, such organizations, so led, fall easy dupes to the wiles of the alien ship-owners, who have never left any stone unturned or any expedient untried to defeat or smother in our own Congress legislation calculated to promote and extend our merchant marine.

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