traffic for tramp steamers via the Canal, or for chartered vessels plying over more or less fixed routes with sailings adjusted to meet varying requirements. The West Coast Line, for example, which uses chartered vessels, could readily adjust itself to changed conditions. Its outward bound ships, with cargoes for the lower Western Coast of South America, would probably continue to go by Magellan, and the home trip would very likely be by Panama as cargo is taken on farther north. In the same way the lines of chartered ships running to the Far East will probably continue to go by Suez for ports south of Shanghai and will be diverted to Panama for ports north of there. It has been reported that extensive iron ore deposits have been found in Chile and are owned by an American steel company which plans to exploit them extensively, bringing the ore north in huge ore carriers such as are employed on the Great Lakes and in the service from Bilbao, Spain, to Great Britain. No accurate estimate of this traffic is possible, but if tentative estimates of 500,000 tons a year should be realized a very considerable fleet of chartered vessels would be employed in this service. If the plan of the United Fruit Company should be followed by the steel company, and efforts made to develop a return traffic in American-made goods along the Western Coast of South America such as the fruit company has built up in the Caribbean region, this line might be productive of vast benefit to American manufacturers and give them a very substantial advantage in the keen rivalry that is certain to take place for the trade of that hitherto only partially developed section.

From the foregoing outline it may appear that the traffic department of the Isthmian Canal Commission has been doing some very effective work. Unfortunately, there is no such department, and, apart from some very instructive monographs regarding distances and toll rates, the Commission has left the steamship men to do their own figuring. On Beaver Street, New York, not far from the Produce Exchange, is a sign reading "Manchester Ship Canal Company." This is one of the two offices maintained by that company to interest

American shippers in routing their good direct to Manchester. Their other office is at Chicago, and similar traffic agencie are maintained at other important shippi centres. As a result of this enterprisin promotion work the traffic of the Manches ter canal has been increased six-fold an: Manchester is now England's fourth sea port. Unless a similar plan is adopted with respect to Panama the new Canal wil unquestionably lose thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of tons of trafi that might otherwise be diverted to it This $400,000,000 enterprise of the United States will soon be a going concern, com peting for its share of world traffic just a other enterprises of the kind have to do It should have a traffic director with a sufficient appropriation for office equipment and for a staff to enable it to take up this great proposition energetically and effec· tively. For every dollar expended on such an organization the Government would obtain a hundred dollars in increased revenues. This important deficiency in the preparation work incident to opening the Canal should be remedied now.

The Canal has, no doubt, stimulated the world-wide movement toward enlarged shipping facilities, but changes are being made, harbors are being improved, new and larger vessels are being put in service along routes that will be in no way affected by the opening of the Canal. Into and across every sea new lines are being planned and existing services are being improved. This world-wide tendency among steamship owners accounts in a large measure for the unusually heavy shipbuilding records. shipbuilding records. Most of the new construction work does not show any radical changes in the design of vessels. It is simply a universal movement to supply something larger, faster, and more luxurious than the best that has hitherto been offered. In all ships, from the small. but admirably appointed, new boats intended for West Indian or other limited traffic, to leviathans like the new Aquitania, increased size and more magnificent equip ment are the order of the day. Greater speed is no longer the chief goal of the builders of the ships of to-day although most of the newer vessels are relatively fast.

tons in 1910; 884,843 tons in 1911; 680,154 tons in 1912 the last being the smallest total reported for twenty years. Even the long continued process of demolition of the world's fleet of sailing ships has been temporarily suspended, the number of this type lost or broken up being also the smallest since 1892, which is as far back as the table in Lloyd's annual summary on this subject extends. The result of this exceptionally small deduction from the world's supply of merchant vessels is that the net addition for 1912 surpassed previous records by more than 100,000 tons.

How long the present era of prosperity in maritime circles will continue is a question that no one can answer. It is probable that the great amount of tonnage added to the world's merchant fleets during 1912, or now under construction, will be enough to meet all immediate requirements, especially as a considerable part of the Panama Canal traffic will not be new business but simply existing traffic diverted to different routes.

An element that is tending automatically to slow down the rate of shipbuilding is the steady rise in the cost of production. Reliable reports declare that many American yards have turned away business during the last year because their terms were higher than steamship owners were able or willing to pay, and this fact is cited to explain why, in a period of mari

time activity without precedent in the world, and with an exceptionally good outlook for new American shipping, the amount of new work under construction in American yards is materially less than it has been on several former occasions. In Scotland several firms of shipbuilders are at present practically losing money on work that was booked some time ago, owing to the subsequent rise in cost of materials and labor.

Nevertheless, the volume of shipbuilding now in course of completion will make this the record shipbuilding year in practically every country in the world except our own. The volume of maritime business, both passenger and freight, is also at practically the highest level ever reported and shows no sign of diminution — on the contrary, everything points to a steady increase in this regard for several years to come, barring such periodical seasons of financial depression as now and then retard activity in certain countries. one jarring note in all this record of prosperity is that under our obsolete navigation laws American citizens are practically barred from the largest and most attractive part of all this traffic, the trade overseas, and that the American flag on a merchant steamship seems destined still to remain one of the rarest sights in hundreds of seaports that are thronged with the ships of other nations.

The

YORK

O

NE day, thirty-one years ago, Abraham Cahan, a young teacher in a government school in Russia, got a letter that puzzled him. The letter was from his mother. She told the family news and the gossip of the neighborhood

about this and that acquaintance of his boyhood. Then came these sentences: "You will be sorry to hear that your schooldays chum, ———, died a few days ago. He was taken down with a severe cold and died suddenly. They buried him deep." Young Cahan pondered these words

carefully. "Buried him deep" is a Yiddish catch-phrase of double meaning, used ironically, even flippantly. His mother was a serious woman: why had she written jestingly of the tragic death of a dear friend? Suddenly he guessed her purpose, and that night, when the police broke into Cahan's lodgings, he had fled. —— and he had been members of the "Reds," and both were still revolutionary Socialists. Siberia is "cold." To their friends, exiles are "buried deep."

To-day Mr. Cahan sits in an office on the tenth floor of a building that is owned by a newspaper that he has built up to be a great business property and a great Americanizing agency among the Jewish people of the East Side of New York. Few men of his race have performed a greater service to the United States than he, for he has taught hundreds of thousands of immigrants what America means, what their duties to it are, and how they can become worthy citizens of this country. Few men have been more useful to their fellows, for he has interpreted to his people the bewildering customs and language of their new home, and in many other ways has helped to ease the trials of their life in a new land. Besides these things, he has written novels that Mr. William Dean Howells has described as works of genius. But they were written seventeen years ago, and soon afterward he found a new means of literary expression in the Forward, and began to develop it after the original ideals that have raised it to be one of the great journals of New York. His own story is a romance of American opportunity.

His boyhood was spent near Vilna, the capital of Lithuania, in Russia. His father was a rabbi who spent his days in pious meditation and in the study of the sacred writings of the Jews. Young Cahan was early sent to the synagogue to get an orthodox Jewish education - an educaan education in religious history and law, and little else. But even then, when he was only ten years old, he was eager for a wider scope. Secretly he paid a Gentile boy neighbor his whole allowance of three copecks (about two cents) a week to teach him the hated "Russian learning" - such secular and forbidden things as arithmetic.

and geography. When he was detected, his father, strangely enough, condoned his offense and encouraged him by_sending him to a State normal school. There he learned not only the things that the Russian Government requires its school teachers to know, but Socialism as well-picked up in a secret club at the risk of his liberty or even life. He left the school at twenty-one a Nihilist. He was sent to a distant province to teach. There his rooms were searched several times by the police, but he had been wise enough to destroy all contraband writings as soon as he had read them, and they found nothing. Then his mother's letter came, warning him that he would be arrested on general suspicion, and he put off the brass-buttoned, blue, swallow-tailed uniform of a government teacher, and fled by night.

Six weeks of wandering brought him out of the country at Brody, in Austria, across the border from southwestern Russia. Here he had about decided to go to Paris to join the Nihilist headquarters, when he heard of a group of fellow countrymen who were going to New York and decided to travel with them.

When he landed in New York, on June 7, 1882, he found there comparatively few people of his race and nationality, for the big immigration of Russian Jews began after the massacres of that year. At once he faced the problem of earning a living. He met it, as thousands have met it since, by becoming a workman, first in a cigar factory and then in a can factory. Meantime he must learn English. He bought a copy of George Eliot's "Mill on the Floss," in the old Seaside Library edition, for twenty cents. At night in his garret room in Clinton Street he read the book, underscoring every word he did not understand and copying it into a pocket notebook with the definition, taken from a polyglot dictionary, after it. Then by day, whenever he had a few spare minutes, he took out his notebook and studied the new words. The first page of the "Mill on the Floss" was black with scorings: he recalls with pride that the last page was clean except for one word underlined.

In those days he breakfasted on stale bread at two loaves for five cents, both

because it was cheap and because, by putting it in his pockets and so using no dishes, he could both study and eat.

Within a year he had written an article in English on the coronation of Tsar Alexander III that was accepted and published by the New York World. Soon he was able to make his living by teaching English to Russians on the East Side. Every moment he could spare from his work he devoted to learning about America. One day he heard that Evarts and Blaine were to speak at the Grand Opera House in New York. He wanted to hear them and he knew he could not understand even a little of what they said unless he heard every word distinctly, for he still was so uncertain in the spoken language that he had been debarred from the platform of a Socialist meeting because he could not make himself understood. So he went to the stage entrance of the opera house and, by mingling with the guests of honor who were invited to sit on the platform, he was permitted to enter with them and get a seat only a few feet from the speakers. He was not quite sure he had understood fully even then until he read in the morning's paper that Evarts had made a very dull speech, and then he was satisfied, because he had been greatly disappointed in Evarts's powers as an orator.

A few years after he landed in New York, the Sun published a series of sketches of life on the East Side which he wrote. By such work, and by articles on American politics for Russian magazines, he made enough money to give up teaching. In 1889, he was editor of the Arbeiter Zeitung. Then he wrote a sombre novel of East Side life, entitled "Yekl." It brought him unexpected praise. One evening, when he came home to his flat in the East Side, he found a card on his table, with a penciled note on it that the caller regretted failing to see him and asking that he call on him. The name on the card was "William Dean Howells." Mr. Cahan had never seen him. He paid the call and was encouraged by Mr. Howells to write more.

A few years later he had an opportunity to go on the staff of an American daily paper, and so he went to the Commercial Advertiser, of New York, as a police

reporter. His object was to study life in its most dramatic phases. Mr. Lincoln Steffens was the city editor, Mr. Norman Hapgood the dramatic editor, and other members of the staff were Mr. Hutchins Hapgood, Mr. Edwin Lefevre, Mr. Carl Hovey, and Mr. Ralph Roy Wilson, all now well-known to the reading public. This group, with which Mr. Cahan was soon intimate, used to gather in the "local room" after the paper went to press at three o'clock in the afternoon and spend hours in discussing literature and life.

Mr. Cahan soon found that he was more interested in literature and life than he was in getting the prosaic facts for police "stories." He would go out to get the details of an arrest and bring back instead a story of an old fiddler, whom he had met by the way, who had just encountered the tragedy of his life in the destruction of his most precious violin. Mr. Steffens saw the "human interest" value of these stories, however, and made them the exclusive work of Mr. Cahan, who was one of the first to write the kind of interviews that are now common in the newspapers interviews which are also character studies of the men who are interviewed. When Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Van Wyck were rival candidates for governor of New York, Mr. Cahan spent nearly a whole night at political conferences in which Mr. Croker, of Tammany Hall, was a participant, and he wrote a character sketch of Mr. Croker, based on that experience, which aroused much interest when it was published, for it revealed the human and personal side of the Tammany leader which the public had never seen nor imagined.

The Spanish War gave Mr. Cahan an opportunity to develop his fondness for drawing word pictures of the human side of the news. He interviewed wounded marines upon their return to New York, and made of their personal narratives vivid and moving pictures of war as the men who fight see it. Especially powerful was his story of a soldier's own account of his sensations the first time he was under fire in battle-a curious confirmation of the dramatic record in Walter Crane's imaginings in "The Red Badge of Courage."