The Daily Ardmoreite. [volume] (Ardmore, Okla.) 1893-current, 1919-06-10

editorial Supplied by American Foreign Traue LeaBup
THE AMERICAN PEOPLE will have two
great questions to decide in the near fu-
ture What shall we do with our rail-
roads, and shall the government try to operate
a merchant marine? Our railroads are al
ready built, and the companies can take them
back if the government does not want to keep
them. Our ships under contract are not half
completed. but the Shipping Board will have
to complete and pay for all the boats under
contract and it cannot dump them back on
private companies.
The Emergency Fleet Corporation, which
is owned by the government through the Snip
ping Board, is chartered and organized the
same as any private corporation, and as soon
as the war is over it will be crippled by being
compelled to obey all the laws which ruined
our old private shipping companies.
The principal laws that control steamship
companies under the American flag were en-
acted in 1871, and running ships under these
laws is about as practical as trying to harvest
wheat with reapers of the vintage of 1871. All
the companies that tried it before the war had
failed or given it up, excepting few in the
coasting trade which do not have to meet for
egn competition.
Ship boilers, for example, were made of
wrought iron in 1871, and our laws today treat
them as wrought iron boilers. There were few
ships in service in 1871 that carried over so
pounds of steam, and most of them carried ~
to so pounds. 1t seems that the only way
known then to test an iron boiler was to pump
it full of cold water under pressure usually
one and a half times the steam pressure the
boiler was expected to carry If it did not
burst under this cold water test they could go
on using a boiler. The law of 1871 directed
that this cold water test should be made once
a year.
In the past 30 years ship boilers have been
made entirely of steel, and they carry 200 to
300 pounds of steam. After a steel boiler has
been in use it gets "set' or adjusted by eXpan-
sion. If it is cooled down and put under the
cold water test a steel boiler is racked and
damaged. Insurance companies never use TINS
test on a steel boiler unless they know it is too
old and. they want to wreck 1t and make the
owner get boiler.
Congress does not seem to know that steel
has replaced iron ship boilers, and our inspec-
tors are even worse. In other countries the
boilers are examined while a ship is loading
or unloading, but our inspectors require that
the ship must be entirely unloaded, all fires
drawn and the boilers all cooled down, to ia
cilitate the cold water test. The owner loses
the use of ship for a week, but his expenses
go on. and when they get through he has re
pair bill for the useless damage. This Is done
every year.
This is only one of many difficulties that
might be mentioned that will confront any
American steamship company in time of peace,
even if the company is owned by the govern
ment American ship owners, before giving it
up, have shed bitter tears trying to get the at
tention of congress to have these old laws re-
vised Congress is too busy and we are all too
busy to know about it. That is why had
fewer steamships engaged in foreign trade in
1914 than Canada or New Zealand, and the
few we had left were going out of business.
We actually had more ships engaged in foreign
trade hundred years ago, or even in 1900,
than our steam tonnage in foreign service in
1914. 1t is not subsidies that we need but re-
vision of our ancient and outgrown navigation
laws.