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FOREIGN TRADE TONNAGE OF THE WORLD'S TEN GREATEST SEAPORTS

New York is in the lead as a world harbor. Besides having the greatest tonnage in foreign trade, New York has a larger coastwise trade than any of the other great seaboard cities of the world

national utility of the port of New York is the new Hell Gate bridge, connecting the lines of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad with those of the Pennsylvania and Long Island System. This connecting bridge will give direct rail connections to New England for the buzzing aggregation of factories in the Brooklyn district. Long Island City, within sight of the Hell Gate bridge, has already grown almost over-night into a district of well lighted, fireproof factories, and the growth still continues. When the South Brooklyn Marginal Railroad is constructed from Brooklyn Bridge south along the waterfront to a junction with the connecting railroad for the Hell Gate bridge route there will undoubtedly be a great industrial development along its line. The longest pier in New York Harbor, more than 1,800 feet long, is now under construction on the line of this railroad for the Luckenbach Steamship Co. In the same districts a new pier is being built for use by the United States Steel Products Company for handling the innumerable products exported by the United States Steel Corporation.

It takes only a stroll among the piers of the freight lines docking at these great Brooklyn waterfront freight terminals to see that New York Harbor is a national

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THE TERRITORY TRIBUTARY TO NEW YORK BY WATER TRANSPORTATION The shaded states around the Great Lakes will find it cheaper to obtain Pacific Coast lumber by way of Panama and the new Barge Canal than by rail haul overland. Manufactured products from many of the central states can, in like manner, be shipped to the Pacific Coast more cheaply by way of the Panama Canal than by all-rail haul, even though the goods must first journey eastward by rail before going west by water

realize his dependence on the port of New York, nevertheless there is scarcely a single element which improves in any way the facilities of the port of New York which does not react to the assistance of thousands of exporters scattered over the whole eastern half of the continent.

It is par

ticularly the smaller manufacturers who obtain the greatest benefit from New York's harbor. A large fertilizer works can be located, if desired, at Newport News and have good service in so far as export trade is concerned, provided there

ships on regular lines, in order to give the rapid and frequent service which his customers in foreign countries will expect.

There are many other arguments for having one great harbor as compared with having the export business divided be tween a number of smaller ports. Freight shipments are inherently subject to unexpected delays, so that it is not always possible for freight shipped hundreds of miles overland to catch a certain steamer. Many of the American ports other than New York have only one steamship line to

certain ports in, say, South America or Australia, and the sailings cannot be as frequent as with the larger tonnage moving through the port of New York. If an export railroad shipment from an inland point happens even slightly to miss one of the steamers of this one line it may mean a delay of some weeks or a month before there is another steamer sailing for the desired port. But should a railroad shipment to a steamship line in New York happen to miss the intended steamer, other ships of the same line are likely to depart so soon thereafter as to involve a much shorter delay than would occur at any other port of the country. Then there is a possibility of having the freight shipped over a different steamship line having a sailing to the same port within a few days, thus making the delay almost negligible. A universal port with a great number of lines radiating from the one city is thus an advantage to all shippers and especially to those of inland manufacturing districts.

Another kind of advantage is this: Many a manufacturer in the interior can maintain an export manager in a New York branch house and give his export trade much more careful supervision than it can receive if managed from the factory headquarters alone. Stocks of goods can be carried on hand at New York warehouses so that export orders can be filled promptly and sometimes leave on a ship within two days after the order is received. In no other seaport of this country is there such excellent opportunity for serving the export trade in these respects.

Still another advantage that New York offers the exporter results from the great diversity of products which it handles. This diversity practically eliminates seasonal fluctuations in the volume of goods handled, and the consequent steadiness of activity tends to lower the cost of doing business and thereby lower the charge which the port must levy on its commerce. Compare, for instance, Galveston's tonnage, which is growing tremendously, having about quadrupled since 1900. Galveston's trade is very largely in cotton, with much more freight moving in some seasons of the year than in others. The

value in dollars of New York's imports over a series of years has not been so very different from the value of the exports. Since Galveston's tonnage is mostly in the exporting of cotton the freight values show that the exports from Galveston are worth, roughly, forty times as much as the imports, thus indicating that the actual tonnage of freight at Galveston is not well balanced and that the harbor cannot become as desirable as New York's for the conducting of a national clearing house for foreign trade. New York's supremacy among the maritime cities of the United States is already so well established that there is no question as to which port is the best on the Atlantic seaboard in which to establish an export branch or carry a stock of goods for the export trade. New York is already the one truly national port, and the question now is how to improve the facilities of that port so that better service can be rendered to the Nation.

NEW YORK VS. FOREIGN PORTS

The necessity for this improvement appears immediately if one studies the enormous growth in tonnages to be handled, or if one compares the improvements that are being made in competitive ports abroad. By referring to the diagram on page 213 it will be seen that the value of the commerce of the whole world just about doubled from 1890 to 1910. The tonnage in the foreign trade of New York Harbor doubled from 1900 to 1914. Though this is a good record for New York, if we consider the opportunities which have existed it would seem that the growth in foreign trade might have been vastly greater had carefully worked out policies of harbor management been followed consistently since the beginning of the present century. Consider city of Antwerp has done. Antwerp is not nearly so well situated as New York from a foreign trade standpoint, and most of its harbor space had to be dredged from cow pastures about ten feet above water level. The River Sheldt was closed by treaty up to 1863, so that commerce at Antwerp really began in that year. Yet between 1863 and 1912 Antwerp came to second position as a world port, despite

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its great natural handicaps of a crooked river, tremendously expensive dredged docking space, and a relatively small population which in 1912 was less than that of New Orleans, Cincinnati, or Newark. And yet, notwithstanding these handicaps, Antwerp's consistent policy of commerce promotion brought the city to an enviable position even though it did not have among its exports the great natural resources which have entered so largely into the trade outward bound from New York.

This last point suggests still another consideration in the problem of New York's utility to the Nation. When looking ahead to estimate New York's chances for the future as a world market-place, it must be remembered that our exports have been very largely made up of natural resources which are irreplaceable. We are shipping complete cargoes of petroleum products and coal. Manufactures of iron and steel, which enter largely into the export tonnage, are frequently in such crude form as steel rails, on which the amount of labor is relatively slight as compared with the value of the material. Thousands of tons of copper are sent out in ingot form to be transformed in the workshops of Europe. Lumber, too, is shipped in bulk; and so it goes, down the line of products. Though our tonnage and values have been vast, when we come to make comparisons with the various ports of Europe it must be remembered that there is a day of reckoning coming and we may not always be able to spare unlimited quantities of our gifts of Nature which now enter so largely into our foreign trade. Comparing our exports and our imports, it is easy to see that the former are largely made up of natural resources and the imports which we take in exchange are composed largely of luxuries, such as wines and silks, or of highly finished manufactured products like Turkish rugs, Irish laces, German toys, Japanese curios, or Swiss watches. Our foreign trade has been like Topsy, it has "just growed," and chiefly because the European nations wanted our crude materials in exchange for their excess output of highly finished products involving much labor. Would it not seem as though we are trading our

natural resources for a mess of pottage? Should we not rather, as Great Britain has done, try to bring the raw materials of other nations to our principal port. to be sold to the manufacturing nations of all the world thus making New York a world market like London-and so earn a brokerage profit on them? Or, when our own manufacturers buy them, a manufacturing profit as well? It is by such a process that the products of the Orient and of the newly developed districts of South America and Africa largely find their way to certain seaports in the Northern Hemisphere which act as the market places to supply the various civilized nations. To facilitate this process and to secure the attending profits, the Port of London Authority has a building devoted entirely to the storage, display, and sale of ivory tusks. Another building is reserved for rubber. Liverpool's tobacco warehouse, owned and operated by the Mersey Docks and Harbor Board, serves as a market-place for American tobacco; and John Bull is enough of a merchant to carry a stock of twenty-five millions' worth of American tobacco in this building. The tobacco is all in casks just as shipped from Kentucky. It would be a very interesting study to determine just why it happens that this tobacco is purchased in England and stored Liverpool for resale rather than held, say, in New York and shipped to different countries as required. There must be money in it for England: why not for us?

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European ports have earned profits by acting as transfer points for American freight which is shifted from one line of ships to another much as one changes cars at some railroad junction. Before the war began one could see at the docks of Liverpool lots of five hundred tons of American paper being transferred to a line of steamers to Australia. On the piers of Hamburg could be seen caterpillar traction engines made in Illinois awaiting opportunity to be loaded on to a ship bound for ports in China. Consider the many disadvantages of handling such heavy goods far off the direct route. And yet neither New York Harbor nor the United States is getting the good of this

business which rightfully belongs to them in the shipping of American products directly from our own factories to the final consumer. And it should not be forgotten, either, that even though the carriers do not fly the American flag, if they sail on direct lines between New York and the ports of the world where goods are pur-, chased, and insure regular and rapid delivery, it will greatly aid in increasing the quantity of goods we can sell to the non-manufacturing countries. Anything which will assist in bringing new lines of steamers to New York will benefit the whole Nation's foreign trade.

In estimating New York's opportunity for leadership as a world market, it seems fairly obvious that the chief competitors are Liverpool, London, Antwerp, and Hamburg. The two latter cities are at present so closely involved in the war situation that it is impossible to predict what may be the outcome. Many of the German merchant ships were captured by England at the beginning of the war, but even before the war the tonnage of merchant ships under the British flag was three fourths of that of all the rest of the nations put together. It looks, then, as though London or Liverpool will make by far the strongest bid for acting as the clearing house for the world's goods.

NEW YORK'S NATURAL ADVANTAGES What, then, are the relative advantages and disadvantages of New York as compared with London and Liverpool? In the first place, New York Harbor is so well situated and has such natural advantages of shape and almost unlimited size that these characteristics make it the logical world's clearing house for shipping. Instead, for instance, of cocoa from near-by Santo Domingo going to England and then being resold to Scandinavia (as sometimes now happens), there would seem to be good opportunity for the cocoa to come here in large quantities for storage and ultimate sale to other nations as needed. The same might be said of South American rubber and innumerable products from the different countries which have not highly developed banking, manufacturing, and merchandising.

By comparison, both London and Liverpool are handicapped in the size and characteristics of their harbors. Thus London is located on an inadequate river requiring much dredging of docking space to obtain modern steamship terminals. Liverpool is tremendously handicapped by a tide of more than 30 feet which necessitates vast expense in the construction of closed dock basins and gates to hold the water in the basins when the tide recedes. The tide at New York, on the contrary, is almost negligible and, since the whole harbor is in one area, lighters may be used in the transfer of freight from pier to pier, as contrasted with Liverpool, where the closed dock system prohibits the transfer of goods from pier to pier or from pier to warehouses except by vehicles, causing a correspondingly higher cost. New York Harbor has more than 450 miles of water front available for pier construction. In so far as space is concerned, there is ample room in New York Harbor for the combined dockage space of any five of the main seaports of Europe.

NEW YORK'S HANDICAPS

Looking at New York's handicaps, it must be remembered that the English seaports have a great advantage in the race for first position as a world market for the reason that Great Britain's vast foreign colonies are peopled with a large percentage of the whole world's population. With British-owned ships sailing under the British flag to British colonies the chances are very greatly in favor of the raw materials of the colonies being carried back to England as the storehouse from which the other nations will be supplied with the raw material or quite likely with the finished product turned out of British factories. Great Britain has always been a builder of trade. Its banking affiliations alone would be sufficient to transfer the products of British colonies to England instead of to America, all other things being equal. Though the war will undoubtedly have an effect on England's financial status, it is certain that that country will make a tremendous effort to retain her position in foreign commerce. Looking again at New York's hopeful

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