to the enlarging commerce with other nations and especially with South America. There is no doubt that the Merchant Marine comes first as a primal requirement, but ships are only one part of the problem. They are carriers only. The development of trade depends upon a variety of agencies such as are here outlined, agencies that have been wrought out through seventy years of experience by one American firm. What Grace & Co. have done in South America, other houses can do, and doubtless will do in the coming years. It will be easier, furthermore, for American traders and merchants and steamship men to plant their work in the foreign soil of Latin Amer

ica because of this far-sighted and efficient pioneering. Grace & Co. are one of the American houses which have successfully led the way. They have revealed for government, for manufacturers and shippers generally, some things that can be done. This house is but one American firm which might be cited. The insistant question with which every enterprising business house of our country must face today is this: "How can our particular house most quickly and efficiently fall into line along the great trade routes that lead to South America, thus casting out a sheet anchor for our future, and adding the commerce of the seas to business at home?"

A

BOUT two years before the European war began, Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy, submitted to Congress the unusual request that it authorize him to sell to the Kingdom of Greece the United States battleships Mississippi and Idaho, and use the money received for them in building one firstclass new Dreadnought.

The whole transaction, so far at least as the present writer knows, stands without precedent in the history of the United States Navy. There has always been, in this country, a deep and abiding sentiment which has clung to every vessel that has ever borne the old flag at her taffrail. We have had a sort of subconscious feeling that our ships, because they were ours, were always the best in the world, and we have hated to think of any of them ever flying any other flag than the one first hoisted above them. And yet, on this occasion Secretary Daniels was permitted to put through his deal with virtually no criticism and no opposition. The Mississippi and Idaho were turned over to Greece; the old flag was hauled down, and the Greek flag hoisted over them, with little ceremony and no excitement, and everybody heaved a sigh of relief at seeing the last of them.

Mr. Daniels at that time was still comparatively new to his job. He was not nearly so well known either to his fellow-countrymen or his subordinates in the Navy as he is today; not nearly so well known, and infinitely less popular. In fact, up to that time practically everything he had done in office had been the subject of bitter criticism and open to covert opposition both within the service and without. But when he sold those two ships he found himself, for the first time, the recipient of virtually unanimous approval. Everybody, in the service and out of it, was heartily glad

to hear that they were sold, and said so. And -take it from one who served on one of them, and knows they had reason to be.

The old Mississippi and Idaho, as Secretary Daniels explained, in part, to Congress, and as everybody in the service had long known, were overgunned for their displacement, cramped and crowded between decks, with woefully insufficient living space for their officers and crew; inadequate in coal and stores capacity; execrable sea boats and unsteady gun platforms; clumsy in manoeuvres and capable, when in formation, of cutting down the speed and steaming radius of the entire fleet. In short, they were a notorious pair of "lame ducks," and, as was often remarked, had been obsolete before they were launched.

Who were the incompetent designers who were responsible for these two melancholy failures? Why were they not held up to the scorn of the entire Navy, if not of the entire country? Because, as it happens, they were the same men whom Americans have long believed, and with reason, to be the ablest naval architects in the world; the very men, who just before turning out these two miserable abortions, had designed and built the five ships of the Connecticut class, in their day the finest battleships afloat, and who soon after the unhappy episode of the Mississippi and Idaho produced such splendid ships as the Delaware, the Florida and Utah, which led the world then, and still rank among the finest fighting machines afloat.

It might be possible to grow rhetorical concerning the mystery of this startling reversal of form on the part of our Bureau of Construction and Repair. But it is not necessary. For when you take down from the shelf the file of Naval Appropriation Bills, and study the law which brought the Mississippi and

Idaho into existence, you find at once that the responsibility for their failure does not lie at the door of the experts, but at the door of a Congress which thought, as Congress has often thought before and since, that it knew more about the science of naval architecture than the men who had spent their lives in studying it, and which in consequence, in appropriating the money for building the Mississippi and Idaho, laid upon the shoulders of their designers an impossible task.

The Congress of that day-1905-was in the midst, when the Naval Appropriation Bill came up for consideration, of a spasin of economy. Previous years had seen money, under the impelling influence of a certain strenuous gentleman with eyeglasses and teeth, spent liberally upon the Navy, and spent well. They had seen those fine ships of the Connecticut class

added to the fleet, and now the Navy Department was anxious to build three more Connecticuts, to round out a homogeneous squadron. But Congress knew better. The Navy had been treated generously for a while; now it was time to call a halt. The appropriation must be cut down. Instead of three ships, but two could be provided. Even the two ships, under the estimates provided cost too much; they must be smaller. So the amateur naval architects of Congress provided that two battleships should be built; that they should carry, as nearly as possible, the same weight of guns and armor as the ships of the Connecticut class; but that they must not displace more than 13,000 tons, or 3,000 tons less than the Connecticut.

Then the Congressional naval architects sat back and put their thumbs in the armholes of

their vests, in the comfortable consciousness of duty well done; but over in the offices of the General Board of the Navy there was wailing and gnashing of teeth, and in the offices of the Bureau of Construction and Repair there was heard language that would not look well in print. But not for long. The experts knew, from long experience, that there is no use swearing at Congress, and they set gallantly to work to make the best of it. Knowing all the time that they were providing the fleet with a pair of lame ducks that would make the Commander-in-Chief swear every time he looked at them, they took their designs for the Connecticut class and ruthlessly cut them.

down to fit the Congressional idea of a bargain-counter battleship.

They tore out about fifty feet of the midship section, taking with it the better part of the ship's manoeuvring qualities and stability as a gun-platform; they squeezed down the 'tween-deck space, amputated coal-bunkers, store-rooms and boilers, taking a couple of knots of speed in the process; they lopped off the quarter-deck, leaving a scant nine feet of freeboard aft, over which green Atlantic seas might frolic; and they accomplished a pair of ships which could, and did, get by under the Naval Appropriation Act, but which were barely good enough, only four years after