if in years past we had owned
our share of the world's shipping, and multiply the $130,000,000 of
freight money we annually pay to foreigners by the number of years
we have been engaged in this suicidal policy of protecting them in
earning money that of right belonged to our own people!

Having sketched this result of American legislation, let us glance at
that of other nations in late years for it is as useless to dwell upon
what it was a century or two centuries ago as it would be to study the
navigation laws of the Phoenicians, or to inquire if Solomon exacted
that the ships bringing his spices from India and his gold from Ophir
should be of Jewish construction. Old things did not pass away and
all things did not fairly become new until the discovery of gold in
California and Australia revolutionized values, created universal
national intercourse, and by thus giving a sudden impetus to commerce,
made the carrying trade an industry of far greater importance than it
had ever been before.

At that epoch, our restrictive laws were productive of no harm to us,
because it so happened that most of the business of the seas was done
in wooden sailing ships, and it also happened, fortunately for us,
that we had the faculty and the means of constructing them better
and cheaper than they could be produced elsewhere. Accordingly our
shipyards became wonderfully active in supplying the demands of our
shipowners, and the _personnel_ as well as the material of our
merchant fleet being of the highest character, it was consequently
in active employment. In the ratio of the increasing value of our
carrying trade there was a corresponding decrease in that of Great
Britain, simply because her restrictive laws, which were the same
then as ours are now, prevented her people from owning such magnificent
clippers as we were able to build, on equal terms with us.

But British statesmen were not inattentive to the situation. They
wasted no time in appointing committees to investigate the cause of
the difficulty, for it was as clear to them as the noonday sun, as
clear as the occasion of our "decadence" should have been to the House
of Representatives that appointed Mr. Lynch--as clear as it should be
to the Congress now assembled.

Parliament deputed no half dozen of its members to spend six months
in running around among shipbuilders, asking them what bounty they
required to build clippers like the Americans, and how long it would
take