Excerpt from Our Merchant Marine: How It Rose, Increased, Became Great, Declined and Decayed, With an Inquiry Into the Conditions Essential to Its Resuscitation and Future Prosperity Edict of Nantes, which deprived France of her best artisans and industries, have been accepted by all historians and econo mists as the two most striking and exceptional examples in modern times, of great national industrial disaster and decay directly contingent on unwise and stupid, but at the same time deliberately adopted, state policies. It has been reserved for the United States, claiming to be one of the most enlightened and liberal nations of the world, after an experience of near three hundred years since the occurrence of the above precedents, to furnish a third equally striking and parallel example of results contingent on like causes, in the decay and almost annihilation of her merchant marine and ocean carrying trade, - a branch of her domestic industry which formerly, in importance, ranked second only to agriculture. It is proposed to tell, in the following pages, the story of this happening, and to endeavor to deduce from a record of sad and mortifying experience, what changes in federal statutes and national policy are essential to resuscitate and again make prosperous our shipping interest. 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.