The British demand for new ships is entirely supplied by the shipbuilding establishments of the country, which in addition have built for other nations during the five years 1910-14 in clusive, an annual average of about 1,027,755 tons, exclusive of ships of war. The mercantile fleets of other nations also consist, to a con siderable extent, of the vessels discarded and sold by the British shipowners.
To this remarkable concentration of a great trade, one of a specially international character, and one greatly desired by all, in the hands of one nation, many causes have contributed. His tory shows that it cannot be attributed to com manding geographical advantage in the position of the British Islands, nor to any supreme apti tude of the British people for the life of the sea, and for conducting the oversea trade of the world. In the art and the science of ship building the French have always been well to the front. In the Napoleonic wars Nelson's best ships were those he had captured of French build. In our own time the French have more than once given a lead in naval construction; the first armored ship was French; it was the French who introduced the water-tube boilers, and constructed the first submarines. The coasts of Normandy and Brittany have always furnished hardy and courageous sailors and fishermen, and yet to-day France stands low in the scale of mercantile maritime powers, notwithstanding the heavy subsidies she pays to her shipbuilders and shipowners. America contests with Great Britain the honor of suc cessfully applying steam to navigation. Ful ton's experimental boat in 1798 was four years earlier than Symington's Clermont on the Forth and Clyde canal. The Savannah in 1819 was the first vessel with auxiliary steam to cross the Atlantic. Both in the construction of sailing ships and in the improvement of the early marine engine America led. The supremacy of the British mercantile marine, therefore, can not be attributed to the possession of superior inventiveness or aptitude of the British men for the command of the sea. The phenomenon itself is a very modern phenomenon. °It may be assumed,° says Mr. Cunningham, an authority on economic history, °that in the Middle Ages the shipping of the Italian Republics and the Haase League excelled that of England.° The chance of England did not come in fact until the discoveries of Columbus and Vasco da Gama opened the western and eastern oceans to commerce, which, until that time, had been con fined principally to the Mediterranean and other inland seas. In later times we find that Spain
and Portugal, and afterward Holland, took the lead in the new ocean traffic, so much so that in 1603 Sir Walter Raleigh wrote, °The mer chant ships of England are not to be compared with those of the Dutch.° The English posi tion, however, was improving, and in 1666 Sir Henry Petty estimated that the Dutch shipping tonnage amounted to 900,000 tons, English to 500,000, French to 100,000, Hamburg, Dan tzig, Denmark and Sweden to 250,000 and Spain, Portugal and Italy to 250,000. At this time English shipping was subject to the celebrated Navigation Act of Oliver Cromwell (1651), the principle of which, broadly speaking, was to confine foreign trade with European countries to the vessels of Great Britain or of the country with which the trade was carried on; and all trade with any of the more distant continents, or with any of the plantations of Great Britain, entirely to British ships. The Navigation Laws of other maritime nations were framed in a similar spirit on similar lines. In the interna tional race all competitors were pretty equally privileged or handicapped. Although the whole system had become, riddled with exceptions and exemptions and suspensions, due sometimes to necessity, and sometimes to reciprocal treaties, the principle of the legislation of Cromwell remained in force until the Navigation Acts were finally repealed in 1849. The great expan sion of the trade of the world in the first half of the 19th century together with the improve ment in the size, speed and cost of building and operating the new steam fleets, had rendered it generally impossible to maintain the mediaeval system of the old Navigation Laws, and although other nations did not, like Great Britain, emancipate themselves from these fetters at a stroke, they have found it impossible to maintain them, and the relics of the ancient system survive in the present day chiefly in the form of the reservation of their coasting trades by many, though not all of the civilized nations of the world; certain restrictions on their colonial trades, and in addition to this, in the case of the United States, the restriction of the privilege of the American register, with its exclusive right to the coasting trade, to ships built in America of American materials. The medimval system in its old barbarous form has universally passed away, and for more than half a century Great Britain has carried on her over sea trade in the atmosphere of free competi tion.