“In the whole world there is no place whatever that can in any degree compare with the Clyde for either extent or quality of steamship building; and at this moment an indisputable verification can be adduced, for between American and European ports there are at the present time something like a score of steam navigation companies, doing an immense passenger and carrying trade, with vessels of great power and magnificence, and notwithstanding the variety of trade nationalities, at least two-thirds of the vessels employed were built and equipped on the Clyde; and more—unless there has very recently been a change, there is not an American steam company in the whole Atlantic trade. With a run of about fifty years to try it, and after many unsuccessful attempts, the Americans have utterly failed to sustain permanent competition. All the British companies have prospered beyond any probable anticipation clothed with reason. The Cunard Company, starting with four vessels some forty years ago, have now twenty times that number. What is this something which enables Europeans to so far outstrip the Americans in a competitive traffic so as to exclude them from the merest show in the largest steam trade in the world? A baneful, overweening, and ignorantly selfish conceit invariably leads to disastrous results, and a nation given over to the fulmination of concentrated boast cannot fail to be suffocated with foolery of its own making.” This is doubtless the outcome of a vicious antipathy—natural in the circumstances—to those stringent and over-reaching laws which forbid that ships built away from America shall sail under the American flag, or enjoy the pertaining privileges. American shipbuilders thus secured from the encroaches of foreign competition, have enjoyed their own pace, but at too great a sacrifice. Preferring to take the material most at hand, the manipulation of which they well understood, they have allowed their wood age to be dove-tailed thirty years into our iron one, with the other result that America now occupies as unimportant a place in the traffic of the sea, as the above quotation indicates.