SHIPBUILDING AND ENGLAND'S GREATNESS.

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume 3670, Issue XXIV, 9 March 1898, Page 4

SHIPBUILDING AND ENGLAND'S GREATNESS.

A TRIBUTE BY AN AmEBICAN CKITIC.

Mr Lewes Nixon in the North American Review for November writes a very interesting article on the commercial value of the shipyard. His object is, of course, to incite the Americans to devote their energy to the building of ships. He does this by dwelling at considerable length upon the example of England. He aays : — The indisputable predominance of England in the commerce, industry and finance of the globe is the result of about a century and a half of national endeavour. The existence of the British marine dates much farther back than that, but the systematic effort of England to dominate the ocean may be dated at the beginning of the old French wax, in 1755. England, he points out, was by no means naturally favoured with the materials for shipbuilding, greatness. At no time after the middle of the eighteenth century did England produce ship timber enough to maintain the material of her navy and merchant marine. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the home supply was practically exhausted. But England bought no ships. She bought ship timber everywhere, carried it to English shipyards and with it still built her own chips. In the most critical period of her greatest struggle and at the extreme of her poverty in ship timber, she not only bought no foreign built ships for her navy, but threw every conceivable obstacle in the way of the purchase of foreign built ships by her private merchants, and prohibited the East India Company, over which the Government had certain control, from buying or using foreign built ships at all. The substitution of iron for wood as to material for shipbuilding enabled England to secure with ease the supremacy which she had struggled bo hard to estajblish. She is now reaping a reward. Mr Nixon says :— British ships now carry more than seven-tenths of the ocean borne commerce of the world. The earnings of her commercial fleet, including the accessories of banking, insurances and cominis sion, exceed eight hundred millions of dollars a year, net cash. Of this the United States contributes, roundly, three hundred millions annually, or an amount equal to about three -fifths of our national revenue. The following passage, in which j Mr Nixon bears tribute to the British supremacy on the high seas, is good reading for the Englishman : — The moment the gang plank is cleared away, he, an American citizen, becomes a Brilish taxpayer ; that, th« moment the ship in which he is a passenger crosses the limit of the marine league from any shore, he becomes a British subject, living on British soil, and amenable to British laws. Ido not by any means intimate that this is necessarily an evil destiny. On the contrary, as things are now, and as things will be until the American people wake up, it is better for a traveller, American or otherwise, to be temporarily a British taxpayer and British subject on the British soil of a British deck on any ocean outside the marine league from any shore, than to be on any other deck; because, American or otherwise, any traveller under t»uch conditions, is always sure of every protection to life and property anywhere ou the habitable globe that omnipresent and omnipotent sea power can give ; and even if he suffers in remote lands, he can at least have the satisfaction of knowing that the retaliatory vengeance of British sea power upon his tormentors will be swift and terrible as soon as a British man-of-war can reach them ! It seems to me that such a picture needs no more colour.