THE GREEDY SHIPOWNERS

Free Lance, Volume XV, Issue 817, 25 February 1916, Page 8

THE GREEDY SHIPOWNERS

Colossal Profits and Increased Freights. THERE is, it would appear, no limit to the greed of the members of the Great Shipping Ring. We Britishers are apt to wax exceeding virtuous in our indignation: over the greed of the American trusts. But it's simply a case of the pot calling the kettle black. When, in one column of our daily newspapers, we read that freights have again been increased, and then in another column, learn how one steamship line has declared a dividend and bonus equal" to 30 per cent., of another which declares a dividend of 25 per cent., and note the declaration of the "Statist," one of the soundest and most scrupulously unsensational of all the British financial papers, that the net gains of shipowners last year were 575 per cent, higher than in 1913 —and that after paying half the surplus to the Treasury!—it is clear that a vast Shipping Trust exists, as greedy as was ever the much reprobated Rockefeller Trust. * # # * The extortions of the Shipping Ring tend to make living dearer, the profits they are amassing are wrung out of the people, for every increase of freight is duly passed on, and often added to, by the merchant, and it is the consumer who in the long run bears the burden. No wonder there should be a cry in England for the compulsory taking over by the State of all commercial shipping and the fixing of some reasonable maximum rates. Lloyd George made no bones about subjecting the great private railways of England to Government control, and should the shipping companies persist in their unpatriotic and selfish policy they, too, must be dealt with in the same way.