Excerpt from American Marine: The Shipping Question in History and Politics Every workman should know his own trade well. Hav ing been for fifty years a student of ships and navigation, I have felt that it was needful to know the causes that have con tributed, first, to the upbuilding, second, to the decline, and third, to the ruin of our shipping interest in the foreign trade. In pursuit of this information time and patience have been well spent, since there was no other way out of darkness into light. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.