Shipping lines are very similar to railroads. A railroad train would be of no use to any one if it were owned and operated as a unit, even though it had all the tracks in a nation at its disposal. The train is practical only because the railroad company maintains freight and passenger stations, foreign and domestic agents, and all the detailed force that a modern railroad requires. Furthermore, it sends its trains over certain routes at certain specified intervals, ready to move freight and passengers as they are ready to be moved. So must a shipping line be operated. Ships must be where they are needed, else freight accumulates or is diverted to other lines. The huge investments ships require necessitate that there be no loss of time and consequently ships must not wait for freight to come to them. Because ships carry great amounts of freight and cannot lengthen or shorten themselves, as trains can, to accommodate fluctuating quantities, it is often necessary for freight to go in “tramp” steamers to ports which attract small amounts of freight. But cargoes must be waiting at those ports for shipment to some other or the ship loses time and the line loses money. Because of this agents are for ever busy, cablegrams are for ever being flashed through the ocean depths, or ships are diverted by wireless in order to take advantage of temporary conditions. These are the duties of shipping lines, and the vast companies of the modern world of the sea are amazingly capable, brilliantly alert, for ever in touch with shifting channels of trade, alert to fill the needs of a busy world that pays them only for the service it demands. Perhaps the fierce competition of to-day seems harsh, yet it is constructive. Perhaps it bears too heavily upon many deserving individuals, yet through it has come about the vast improvement that has marked the shipping world in the last hundred years—an improvement that has shortened voyages, limited the time between continents, reduced the very world until voyages around it are now almost commonplace summer holidays.