owners for freight, and the figures which show the small percentage of our foreign commerce which is carried under the American flag, in themselves prove nothing at all. The only question which is of importance is this: are the people of the United States better employed now than they would be if engaged in owning and sailing ships? If they were under no restraints or interferences, that question also would answer itself. If Americans owned no ships and sailed no ships, but hired the people of other countries to do their ocean transportation for them, it would simply prove that Americans had some better employment for their capital and labor. They would get their transportation accomplished as cheaply as possible. That is all they care for, and it would be as foolish for any nation to insist on doing its own ocean transportation, devoting to this use capital and labor which might be otherwise more profitably employed, as it would be for a merchant to insist on doing his own carting, when some person engaged in carting offered him a contract on more advantageous terms than those on which he could do the work.
Furthermore, the people of a country which had little foreign commerce might find it very advantageous to prosecute the carrying trade. In history, the great trading nations have been those which had a small or poor territory at home: the Dutch were the great carriers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the foreign commerce of their own territory was insignificant; the New Englanders of the last century and of the first quarter of this century became the carriers of commodities to and fro between all parts of the world, especially between our middle and southern states and the rest of the world. They took to the sea because their land did not furnish them with products which could remunerate their capital and labor so well as the carrying trade did. They won a high reputation for the merchant service, which was in their hands, and they
