deprived, the
hardship to our shipowners would be comparitively trifling, although
the tax upon ships of inferior workmanship and higher cost would, like
all the operations of the tariff, be felt by the community at large.
This is evident enough.

The Pacific Mail Steamship Company, for example, in order to pay
expenses, to say nothing of profits, are obliged to charge a higher
fare to passengers, to exact higher rates of freight from shippers
and to demand a larger postal contract from government than they could
afford to take, if by being allowed to supply themselves with ships
in the cheapest markets of the world and of the best quality that
competing shipyards could turn out, they might save one-third of
their cost and have better steamers. If, therefore, we had only the
coasting trade to consider, we might say that the prohibitory statute
would not pinch the shipowner particularly, but its evil would be
generally distributed. We are actually carrying on the coasting trade
in this way, and as it is all that shipowners have left, of necessity
they oblige the community to pay them the excess of cost in order that
protection may inure to the benefit of the few monopolists who build
iron steamships and are able to force the quality and price upon their
unwilling purchasers. We can, and do without considering the pockets
of the majority, make whatever laws we please for our own coasting
trade.

But now let us look at the ocean rolling from continent to continent,
unfettered by the chains with which "protection" can bind the lands
and coasts upon its borders appropriated by nations to themselves. It
is independent of an American tariff and of them all, as it was in the
days when--

"It rolled not back when Canute gave command."

It welcomes the people of all nations on equal terms to its bosom,
and Commerce is the swift-winged messenger ever travelling from shore
to shore. Look at it, and if our eyes could scan it all at once, we
should see the smoke darkening the air as it rises from hundreds of
chimneys, telling of fires that make the steam for propelling the
mighty engines that bring the great leviathans of commerce almost
daily into our ports and into those whom we supply and by whom we are
supplied with the products of mutual labor. The flags of all nations
are at their peaks--the British, German, Dutch, Danish, Belgian,
French--but among the three hundred and more there are only four that
carry the stars and