These wrecks, upon which the British Government had paid out millions in insurance, were the property of the State, but the chances of raising them were accounted so slight that it was not considered policy to spend further money on them. Well-known salvage concerns, however, had no difficulty in obtaining permission to salve any ship which they had a fancy to raise. They had but to go to the shipping department concerned in order to win a sympathetic hearing. The terms of the contract were on the “no cure, no pay” principle, which meant that any salvage firm with the courage to risk a few thousand pounds in trying to raise a particular wreck was quite at liberty to do so. In return for the concession to work on the wreck, they agreed to give the Government a certain percentage of the value recovered, the percentage being arrived at by mutual agreement. All risk was consequently borne by the salvage concerns, who lost their money in the event of failure and shared their winnings with the Government if they were successful. The high cost of shipping at that period led to considerable activity on the part of salvage concerns, for if luck happened to be with them there was the prospect of making a fortune out of one operation. But a shipping slump without precedent in all history quickly worked a tremendous revolution. Some new ships halved their value in six months, second-hand ships fell in price from £30 a ton to £7 or less a ton. One great shipping firm had to set aside a fund of half a million in order to write down the value of their new ships directly they were launched, for their new liners were worth more on the stocks than they were in the water. The only way of making their ships pay at all was to decrease their cost, and this could only be done by sacrificing the money saved and placed in reserve. In many cases shipowners paid huge sums to shipbuilders in order to be released from contracts, for they were able to buy new ships at half the price similar ships would cost to build. This remarkable change was brought about by the great shipbuilding programmes forced on the Allies by the submarine campaign. Not until after the war was the full force of these programmes felt. The new ships coming off the stocks made up the lost tonnage in a few months. The seized German ships helped to increase the slump, and the world found itself richer by 11,000,000 tons of shipping than it had been in 1914. The war had destroyed the markets, the Continental nations had no longer any money with which to buy goods, and the result was the most dramatic change in history. Shipowners who a year previously had been clamouring for ships at any price, were compelled to let 8,000,000 tons of shipping lie idle.