began building steamships with screws instead of paddle-wheels.  For some reason, however, not easy now to conjecture, shipbuilders clung to the paddle-wheels for vessels making the transatlantic voyage, long after they were discarded on the shorter runs along the coasts of the British isles.  It so happened, too, that the first vessel to use the screw in transatlantic voyages, was also first iron ship built.  She was the “Great Britain,” a ship of 3,000 tons, built for the Great Western Company at Bristol, England, and intended to eclipse any ship afloat.  Her hull was well on the way to completion when her designer chanced to see the “Archimedes,” the first screw steamer built, and straightway changed his plans to admit the use of the new method of propulsion So from 1842 may be dated the use of both screw propellers and iron ships.  We must pass hastily over the other inventions, rapidly following each other, and all designed to make ocean travel more swift, more safe, and more comfortable, and to increase the profit of the shipowner.  The compound engine, which has been so developed that in place of Fulton’s seven miles an hour, our ocean steamships are driven now at a speed sometimes closely approaching twenty-five miles an hour, seems already destined to give way to the turbine form of engine which, applied thus far to torpedo-boats only, has made a record of forty-four miles an hour.  Iron, which stood for a revolution in 1842, has itself given way to steel.  And a new force, subtile, swift, and powerful, has found endless application in the body of the great ships, so that from stem to stern-post they are a network of electric wires, bearing messages, controlling the independent engines that swing the rudder, closing water-tight compartments at the first hint of danger, and making the darkest places of the great hulls as light as day at the throwing of a switch.  During the period of this wonderful advance in marine architecture ship-building in the United States languished to the point of extinction.  Yachts for millionaires who could afford to pay heavily for the pleasure of flying the Stars and Stripes, ships of 2500 to 4000 tons for the coasting trade, in which no foreign-built vessel was permitted to compete, and men-of-war—­very few of them before 1890—­kept a few shipyards from complete obliteration.  But as an industry, ship-building, which once ranked at the head of American manufactures, had sunk to a point of insignificance.

The present moment (1902) seems to show the American shipping interest in the full tide of successful reestablishment.  In Congress and in boards of trade men are arguing for and against subsidies, for and against the policy of permitting Americans to buy ships of foreign builders if they will, and fly the American flag above them.  But while these things remain subjects of discussion natural causes are taking Americans again to sea.  Some buy great British ships, own and manage them, even although the laws of the United States compel