Manual of Ship Subsidies

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

The term subsidy, defined in the dictionaries as a Government grant in aid of a commercial enterprise, is given different shadings of meaning in different countries. In all, however, except Great Britain, it is broadly accepted as equivalent to a bounty, or a premium, open or concealed, directly or indirectly paid by Government to individuals or companies for the encouragement or fostering of the trade or commerce of the nation granting it.

Ship subsidies are in various forms: premiums on construction of vessels; navigation bounties; trade bounties; fishing bounties; postal subsidies for the carriage of ocean mails; naval subventions; Government loans on low rates of interest.

In Great Britain they comprise postal subsidies and naval subventions, ostensibly payments for oversea and colonial mail service exclusively, or compensation for such construction of merchant ships under the Admiralty regulations as will make them at once available for service as armed cruisers and transports. They are assumed to be not bounties in excess of the actual value of the service performed, with the real though concealed object of fostering the development of British overseas navigation. Still, notwithstanding this assumption, such has been their practical effect.

Their original objects when first applied to steamship service, as defined by a Parliamentary committee in 1853, were—"to afford us rapid, frequent, and punctual communications with distant ports which feed the main arteries of British commerce, and with the most important of our foreign possessions; to foster maritime enterprise; and to encourage the production of a superior class of vessels, which would promote the convenience and wealth of the country in time of peace, and assist in defending its shores against hostile aggression." To foster British commerce they have undeniably been employed to meet and check foreign competition on the seas, as the record shows.

In the United States they have taken the form of postal subsidies openly granted for the two-fold purpose of the transportation of the ocean mails in American-built and American-owned ships, and the encouragement of American shipbuilding and ship-using.

GREAT BRITAIN

England has never granted general ship-construction or navigation bounties except in the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. Under Elizabeth Parliament offered a bounty of five shillings per ton to every ship above one hundred tons burden; and under James I that law was revived, with the bounty applying only to vessels of two hundred tons or over.

A policy of Government favoritism to shipping, however, began far back in the dim ninth century with Alfred the Great. Under the inspiration of this Saxon of many virtues, his people increased the number of English merchant vessels and laid the foundation for the creation and maintenance of a royal navy. The Saxon Athelstan, Alfred's grandson, whose attention to commerce was also marked, first made it a way to honor, one of his laws enacting that a merchant or mariner successfully accomplishing three voyages on the high seas with a ship and a cargo of his own should be advanced to the dignity of a thane (baron).

The first navigation law was enacted in the year 1381, fifth of Richard II....