whole-heartedly into the naval-reserve relation with the navy, meantime fostering in every way the enforcement and new enactment of governmental restrictions upon the navy that compel it to keep its hands off civilian ships doing the normal shipping work even in war-time, as civilian ships always have done during all wars and notably during the great war just closed, and that limit the navy's arbitrary demand for men in the naval reserve when war comes to the men it actually needs aboard fighting, not transporting, ships for fighting, not transporting, needs.

THE

IV

SHIPPING TRADES AND ROUTES

'HE great shipping routes for the United States are, naturally, the transatlantic run between our north-Atlantic ports and Europe, the transpacific run between our north-Pacific ports and Asia, the ocean coastwise runs to the east and west coasts of South America, and the great fresh-water run of the Great Lakes from Duluth, at the head of Lake Superior, eight hundred miles to Buffalo, with wheat and ore and the return run with coal. Compared with these all other routes, even the Alaskan run, are minor routes in United States shipping.

A sailorman is as much interested in trades as he is in routes. If you have your choice between carrying guano or nitrates between the same South American country and the same United States port the man who would prefer guano to nitrates had his sense of smell left out in the making of him. The

coastwise coal-carrying trade has no points to recommend it in preference to a nice passenger-ship run between the same ports. So trades mean as much to a man at sea as routes do. He'll want to sample them all, but the smallest possible sample of some of them will be a plenty.

The "geography of transport" varies for each country that has a merchant marine. Different countries develop different routes that are their specialties, as the Indian and Australian trades with Great Britain, but along the great arteries of trade all the merchant fleets of the world intermix and there is keen competition.

We will meet Great Britain more in South American trade now and hereafter than ever before because, although this was a natural market for us, we had neglected it and allowed Great Britain and Germany, competing with each other; to establish there the kind of connections rightfully ours quite unchallenged by us. We will meet Japan in Pacific trades, where both the United States and Great Britain have too easily conceded a predominance. The African trades will not be so readily ours as they are Great Britain's, and we will have to fight somewhat as interlopers in that trade. The China trade, on the

other hand, comes into our scheme through long tradition and neglected but still powerful banking and marketing affiliations. Our trade with Russia is bound to develop by all the routes, the Pacific, the Baltic, and the Black and White Sea ports, and we will have to meet the Germans, the British, and the French there. But on both coasts of our own two continents and direct across the two greatest oceans are the big lines of our seagoing development, with the Great Lakes naturally reserved for us alone. The season of 1918 there were 550 ships operating on the Great Lakes of over five and a half million dead-weight tonnage and they carried as their chief, though by no means their only, cargoes 61,000,000 tons of ore down to Buffalo, New York, and Erie, Pennsylvania, both on Lake Erie, and to ports near Chicago and Gary, Indiana, on Lake Michigan; 33,000,000 tons of coal from Buffalo and Erie up the Lakes to Duluth and other ports; 7,500,000 tons of stone; 168,000,000 bushels of wheat; and 78,000,000 bushels of other grains; a total of 246,000,000 bushels of grain out of the Northwest by water to the eastern United States-all this during an unusually short ice-free season of a little more than seven months.

The war shot many established tradingroutes to pieces, because ships were arbitrarily put into routes that would bring military supplies where they were needed. The nitrate and manganese trades, for instance, grew beyond all legitimate peacetime requirements, and the sugar trade from Java and the wheat trade from Australia and through the Black Sea and the Dardanelles from Russia died. These will grow again. There is a great flour trade from the Pacific coast around to the Atlantic coast (San Francisco to New York) that was emphasized during the war, but will be a big factor steadily.

There is the manganese trade from the east coast of South America and the nitrate trade from the west coast of South America; the coffee trade from Brazil; the banana trade from the West Indies and Central America; the sulphur trade and the phosphate trade; the oil trades from Texas and Mexico with development of oil promising in South America; the African trades, which had twenty-three ships in it the early part of 1919 and were bound to have more; the Australian, New Zealand, and East Indies trade, with forty-five ships in it at the same time and with the same assurance of