war

any or all members of the National Guard

and of the National Guard Reserve."

These together with the Regular Army and the Federal Reserves will place at the call of the nation about 800,000 soldiers, and within a few years the total may reach a million men. Moreover, there is ample provision for special training camps and for officers' training camps in the colleges, and educational courses for the soldiers with the colors to fit them for some trade on their return to civil life.

No military measure to compare with it has ever been passed by Congress—not even during the Civil War, and with its passage the greater part of the fight for preparedness was over.

CHAPTER XIX

THE NEED OF COMMERCIAL PREPAREDNESS

Military preparedness was only one of the new issues created by the war. Commerce, business, finance, education-all were greatly affected. The war, therefore, had been in progress only a few weeks when commercial preparedness became a live issue. In his campaign for military preparedness, President Wilson said:

"By an oversight, for which it is difficult to forgive ourselves, we did not provide ourselves when there was proper peace and opportunity with a mercantile marine, by means of which we could carry the commerce of the world without interfering with the natives of other nations which might be engaged in a controversy not our own."

This oversight explains much of the depression in business, the panic of the railroads, the closing of factories, the decline in the price of cotton, the rise in the cost of living, and the diminishing returns from the tariff during the first months of the European war. But how did this "oversight" have such a damaging effect on the American people?

It was well known in trade circles even before the outbreak of the European war that the ships of European nations were really the carriers of American commerce. Only about eight per cent of American foreign trade was carried in American vessels. Moreover, it is the established policy of this Government to draw the larger part of its revenue from the tariff which is dependent upon this trade. Therefore, any force that affects trade affects, likewise, the whole commercial life of the people and the revenue of the American Govern

ment.

At the beginning of the war only six steamships out of the three hundred, more or less, regularly engaged in the great transatlantic trade between the United States and Europe, were flying the American flag. Moreover, there were no American steamship lines to the leading countries of South America with the exception of one freight line operated by the United States Steel Corporation with the chartered ships of the AmericanHawaiian Company from New York to Brazil. was America's commercial preparedness to meet a great crisis, when the world should have been her trade unit and vessels flying the American flag should have crowded all the seas.

Such

The vessels of Germany and England were supreme on the seas. However, at the outbreak of the war the ships of Germany were at once bottled up at home or interned in foreign ports to lie idle until the end of the

war. The vessels of England were now the servants of the war. Many were converted into naval auxiliaries. Many more were impressed into service as transports for troops. The great transatlantic liners were carriers of war munitions, and all were subject to such risks that war insurance made it next to unprofitable to carry any freight save war supplies. The result was natural-a paralysis of American commerce and a stagnation in all business circles, a decline in revenue and a resort to new and vexatious modes of taxation, a discontent throughout the nation and a widening of the breach between citizens whose sympathies were running strongly with their respective fatherland at war; and not only was the prosperity of the entire nation seriously disturbed, but the neutrality of its citizens was greatly endangered.

More than a century ago Washington and Jefferson warned this country that dependence upon foreign nations as our sea carriers was a costly blunder, and so quickly did American business respond to that warning that by 1810 American ships were carrying over 90 per cent of this country's produce. But in 1910, a century later, foreign nations were carrying more than 90 per cent of American trade, while American vessels were carrying barely 8 per cent. It was the Civil War that finally destroyed American commerce and gave to England the supremacy of the seas, and since that time American business has developed under Governmental protection. Therefore, it ceased to seek new fields of

adventure where the protection of the Government was wanting.

Over and over again the question of subsidies to American ships was proposed in Congress. This policy was championed by the Republican party, under whose guidance American business formed the habit of relying on the Government for protection. But the Democratic party, having a traditional abhorrence for such protection whether pertaining to the tariff or to American built ships, declared quadrennially in their platforms against such a policy. It had become the habit of one party to favor and the other to oppose protection, and a certain mental habit was the result, which had reached a fixedness so unprogressive, that Congress was almost unable to act on any great public question if the element of protection was discovered to be lurking somewhere within its folds. Therefore, nothing was done to improve our merchant marine.

Such a condition was not the result of an "oversight" on the part of President Wilson. When the Democratic party in 1912 notified him of his nomination for the Presidency, he called the attention of the party then to this great need, and he was deeply in earnest when he declared that, "without a great merchant marine we cannot take our rightful place in the commerce of the world."

"Merchants," he said, "who must depend upon