Ottumwa tri-weekly courier. [volume] (Ottumwa, Iowa) 1903-1916, 1910-01-18
SHIPS For rHE CANAL.

-
/ South America and the Orient has
been urged for years by manufacture
ers who are eager to increase Ameri-
can trade in foreign markets. The ar
guments advanced by the manufacture
, ers are summarized in an editorial in
I the Chicago Examiner in which atten-
ton is called to the necessity Of legis-
lation along this line. The Examiner
says:
The manufacturers lay impressive
stress upon the fact that we are build
ing Panama canal at a cost of some
thing like half a billion dollars-with-
out having single ship ready to sail
through it.
Out of our very incomplete and in
efficient ocean mail service the gov
eminent is making an annual profit Of
three or four millions, at least And
1t is hard to see how any sensible
man can object to our dedicating that
sum to the creation of few new
American mail ships that might make
some use of our expensive artificial
waterway and improve our connection
with Pacific and South American mar
kets.
Our merchant marine has shrunk in
fifty years to about 40 per cent of its
former tonnage, while our ocean-carry-
ing business for the most
part the ships of foreign nations-has
increased nearly five-fold.
But we should have many more
goods to send across the seas If we
had more ships to carry them in
with better mail service, more direct
routes of transportation. A new i'm
pulse of international understanding
and reciprocity would come with re-
vival in the American people of its
seafaring traditions.
1t is humiliating to be told that in
the year 1908 only one American mer-
chant ship passed through the Suez
canal and that at Copenhagen, the
most important port on the Baltic, the
starry flag was last seen on mer-
chant vessel eighteen years ago.
1t is perhaps even more humlliating
to be reminded that when President
Roosevelt sent our sixteen great bat
tleships around the world he had to
charter twenty-seven foreign GOLFERS
to supply their bunkers, and that if
war had broken out at that time,
these coaling ships would, under the
neutrality laws, have faded away at
once, and left our magnificent men-of-
war as helpless as painted ships upon
q painted ocean.
A country, the Examiner concludes,
that can afford to spend hundred
and fifty millions year for fighting
ships, and half billion for ship
canal and twenty millions in
substituting a rural free delivery mail
service, can afford an annual invest
ment of three or four millions, or even
more, to supply transports for the
navy, few ships for the ship canal,
and an improved mail service to the
outer world
HARD LINES FOR HUBBY.
1t is easy to work up little sympa-
thy for Chicago man who has been
driven to the divorce court by his in
ability to come up to the require
ments his wife demands in husband.
The wife in this case decided that
she could not live with man who
occupied such low spiritual level on
this earth and she put the matter
squarely up to him that he would
have to be "reincarnated" thousands
of times before he would reach her
level.
Il could not he sorrowfully told
the court, grow from mollusk into
a creeping animal and then from that
into an ape and so on until became
a perfect man That is what my wife
told me would have to do before I
reached her level"
Once, this man said, his wife show
ed him picture that depicted a wom-
an looking at a beast. The woman
was perched on the pinnacle Of
flame and the beast was crouched at
the bottom. His wife told him that
he was the beast, and she was the
beautiful woman at the top, and he
believed that this picture typifled the
position the two occupied in their
home.
1t would be a little disheartening,
wouldn't it, to have wife springing
that kind Of psychic Cuff on you?