However, while the Lynch Committee was logical in its suggestion or recommendation of remedy, its investigations, so far as the sum-total of the causes of decline were concerned, and its estimate of those causes were incomplete and inconclusive, because it started out with the dogma that the then existing depression of the merchant marine was due wholly to the ravages of the war; and it did not take into account the correlative or co-operative facts of the situation, which were much broader and deeper in their application and effect than the mere suspension or destruction of our merchant marine by the war itself. In other words, the Lynch Committee failed to grasp or appreciate the fact that, while the war was wrecking our sea-going commerce, foreign maritime powers, and particularly the English, were making the most gigantic efforts not only to take the place of our ruined trade, but also to provide for a perpetuity of the substitution, so that at any time between the close of the war and the investigations of the Lynch Committee it had become impossible for an American ship-owner to operate a ship or a line of ships in any route of ocean traffic. By means of liberal subsidies under the guise of mail pay, the British had in the interim covered every sea-road and appropriated every channel of ocean commerce. This fact the Lynch Committee seems to have ignored, although it was really the prime factor in the situation, as it stood in 1870. Mr. Cramp, in his statement before the Lynch Committee, went altogether out of the beaten path pursued by most of the other ship-builders or ship-owners who appeared. He said in effect that while the Civil War had been an immediate cause of the destruction of our merchant marine as it existed at the beginning of that struggle, still that was purely a physical cause, and in the absence of other causes need not operate after the war ended. He called attention to the fact that the war had now been ended five years, but that the condition of our merchant marine, particularly in foreign trade, remained as pitiable as it had been in the height of the struggle. This he said argued the existence of other and more lasting causes than the simple destruction by war, whether by the government taking up our merchant-ships for its own use, or by the transfer of a great many of them to foreign flags to get the benefit of neutrality, or by the actual depredations of Anglo-Confederate privateers. He explained that during our misfortune the English took every advantage in the way of appropriating to themselves and to their own ships the traffic which our ships had formerly carried; that when the war closed, they had absolute command of the ocean-carrying trade, our own as well as theirs.