forgotten differences and gotten together. Men who were for years the keenest of business rivals, have forgotten the days of trade warfare in the common effort. I cannot think of any more splendid example of single hearted service than that displayed by the oil men in the last year. Not a single man has held back. Every producer has risked large amounts in drilling in the hope of increasing vil production. Refiners have made heavy expenditures upon new plants to meet the increasing demand and just as the service flag of every oil corporation in the country is decked with scores and hundreds of stars, so every oil man has put his financial resources and his skill at the command of the country. The American oil men have been prepared for every emergency that has arisen, and as I stand here today I do not predict, but I do say, and I say because I know the facts, that the American Government and all our Allies in the present year will be supplied with every gallon of kerosene, gasoline and lubricating oil that they need to help drive Germany back beyond the Rhine.

If the war has done nothing else it has taught the oil trade the amazing lesson of the leverage which may be obtained from co-operation. That system carried to the vicious extreme of the practical elimination of individual thought and action has made Germany a great war machine if nothing else. But that it is a factor, the importance of which a free people are bound to underrate, is undeniable. The value of pulling together has proved absolutely indispensable in this war and it is a lesson that we Americans in particular must. keep clearly in mind both now and when we again face the problems of peace.

We are by nature, and by the training of our institutions, individualists. We believe in and we like individual effort, individual initiative, and free play of individual action, but in the last two or three years we have been shown the insufficiency and futility of unco-ordinated effort. We are coming to realize more and more that if the power of this great nation of ours is to be conserved and utilized to its full worth, both now and in future, we must study and apply to the details of our daily life and

our national life these lessons of co-operative organization.

It must be broad co-operation, too. We must all, and particularly manufacturers develop a new and a far fuller and more practical conception of the power of union, if American business after the war is to find itself ready to take its share of the great task of reorganization and development that peace will bring to

us.

I suppose that we can assume that this reorganization and development will be largely in our foreign trade. Our industrial equipment which was ordinarily roughly equal to our requirements has been abnormally expanded in certain departments to meet special requirements created entirely by the war; while in other departments the commercial organism has become atrophied because of disuse owing to the falling off of certain markets, the lack of raw materials, or for some other reason.

We can reasonably expect to place our commercial machinery in smooth running order within a comparatively short time after the war's close, but we will have to do more than that; we will have to consider seriously and thoughtfully our foreign trade. We must remember that no matter what part commercial treaties may play in recompensing the nations which have been despoiled, and who will seek indemnity in some form or other, from the Central Powers, the trade instinct of the world will be aroused again as soon as peace is declared, and there will be the same old struggle for commercial supremacy. It is inevitable

that we will then be one of the contestants for world trade because our industrial plant has grown to world trade proportions; we will have gained in knowledge of international business and international banking by this war; but mainly because it will be our economic part and duty to assist in providing for a cold, tired and hungry world.

The war at least has removed one of the disabilities from which we have suffered as international traders. Because other nations being old and with no home markets to develop had gone further as international merchants, they were therefore better established and more efficiently equipped, and we were disposed to con

D

O you know that civilization's tremendous struggle for existence to-day rests at bottom on the clipper ship? In its long and terrible evolution the great conflict has devolved upon the United States. We must turn the scale-with men, with supplies, above all, with ships. And the ships that are to win this war, whether they are the wood hulls of which so much was hoped at first, or the wood and iron compromise of dubious makeshift, or the swift freighters of steel that have been standardized in private as well as government yards, are true clippers still, in fact as well as in name.

The clipper, queen of the seas, has had many fond eulogists, from historians of our merchant marine like John R. Spears, and that enthusiast of the old China trade, Basil Lubbock, to William Brown Meloney, whose "Heritage of Tyre," brief as it is, has become a classic of the sea. Yet all have passed over, with bare allusion or a complete ignoring, the obviously remarkable truth that the clipper splendidly survives; in their laments over the disappearance of the picturesque sails and rigging, as in their indictment of us as a people faithless to our empire of the waters, they have agreed to regard the clipper as vanished to lee shores and Davy Jones, with barely the skeleton of a hull left to justify the requiescat.

If the modern steel vessel-and especially the vessel of the speedy freighter type which, for our salvation, we are building now by the millions of tons-performed no function other than that of clipping days off the old freighters' time for the trans-Atlantic voyage, it would be a "clipper" in the most ancient and honorable meaning of the word; for to go at a clip and to clip tag ends of time from record after record, was precisely what the old clippers were built for. But there is more to it than empty etymology. In the course of the scant three centuries that span shipbuilding in America.

the ship itself has steadily withdrawn, like a submarine's contracting periscope, from the air down into the sea. The towering cabins, the lofty bows, the sky-reaching masts, the exquisite, uttermost kerchief of canvas-all of these have shrunk, down and down, until the waters engulf everything except the bare, lean deck. From a thing afloat the ship has become a thing all but submerged. And where, aforetime, the essential of the ship was even more superstructure than it was bottom, the superstructure has vanished wholly and the hull alone remains. The hull to-day is the ship. And the hull is the clipper hull.

It is possible to put one's hand upon the very instant of the transition, when steam, in its earliest ambitious, striving to wrest from the dominant clipper queens the sovereignty of the oceans, seized boldly on the clipper's hull and made it peculiarly its own. It was in the years 1843 and 1844 that the Harlan and Hollingsworth Company, at Wilmington on the Delaware, built the first iron sea-going propeller steamship produced in the United States -the "Bangor," subsequently purchased by the United States Government and renamed the "Scourge." Compare its body lines with those of that famous clipper, "Flying Cloud," or even with the hull of the "Carolina" of Salem, built in Medford on the banks of the Mystic as far back as 1836. The differences are minor differences-accentuation of the reach of the bow, a slightly greater overhang to the stern; but the similarities are those of nearest kith and kin, such as identify the types with the same family-such, indeed, as often betoken the relationship of twins. Square-rig that old "Bangor" and the very rake of her masts would class her as a clipper of her period.

The importance of the clipper as the factor that influenced all of our modern ship designs -actually as making possible the speed to which we have ultimately attained with steam

-is to be appreciated only when we hark back to the archaisms of shipping. To-day one may search the waters for any surviving example of the hulls which the clipper and its swift forerunner, the schooner, superseded, and fail to find any save among the junks of China's ports and to invest them with a curious interest

to the mod

ern eyethe

among

old barges, blunted fore and aft, that wend their loitering way along the

reaches of

our neglected canals.

The Mystic River, where the "Carolina" was launched in 1836, afforded at Medford the site of the first shipyard, properly socalled, in

America. The

Puritan colo

under the name, "Blessing of the Bay."

Then began the long series of launchings and trading voyages, destined in the end to make America's ships-in spite of every rivalry, in spite of oppressions that drove us, fearfully

reluctant, into two warsdominant in trade on the

waters of the

nists who, in 1629, joined the earlier emigrants in their settlements on the

shores of Massachusetts Bay, included practical shipbuilders and carpenters who, establishing a yard at Medford, were joined a year later by emigrants fresh from Europe. It was on July 4, 1631, that the first sea-going vessel, a "bark of 30 tons," was launched

bred. Το them, a ship was a magnificent structure of stern cabins piled

up into towers, all carved and painted for the delight of the eye, with such stretches of canvas outspread as the floating wooden castle might spare room for; anything short of that was an apology, a maritime shame. But needs must when poverty drives and the poor shipbuilders