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portion of exports to total production has doubtless been much greater than that.

IMPORTS.

But our concern is by no means all on the side of our export trade. A situation of this kind contains serious possibilities concerning imported commodities which enter into the daily needs of the people, and for which we are absolutely dependent upon foreign markets. Take rubber, for instance. We imported last year nearly $165,000,000 worth of the crude article, approximately two and a half times the amount brought in during 1914, but not enough to meet all our requirements with ease. Among the other important items on the import side of the balance sheet last year were: hides and skins, $173,000,000; chemicals, drugs and dyes, about $120,000,000; vegetable fiber, manufactured and unmanufactured, $135,000,000; mineral and vegetable oils, $55,000,000; tea, $20,000,000; undressed furs and skins, $18,000,000; wood pulp, $21,000,000. The German submarine blockade, if successful, would not deprive us of all of these, but even an approximate success would so reduce the amount of the world's shipping that we who control little of it would find our imports as well as our exports badly crippled. (World's Work, XXXIII, 561-564; March, 1917).

(b) [§273] Our Submarine Chasers.

BY WILLIAM HARD (April, 1917.)

By this time the public eye sees hundreds and even thousands of small boats-regular navy ones and private auxiliary oneshastening up and down our coasts from Bath, Maine, to Galveston, Texas, shooting the periscopes off submarines. Therefore I submit a count of what we really have and of what we are likely to get. I begin with the regular navy.

GUNBOATS.

We have gunboats. We have twenty-eight gunboats. They are strong enough to kill a submarine all right because they are armed with three-pounders and six-pounders and even fourinchers. They have good teeth. But they are old. Twentythree out of the twenty-eight were born before the Spanish war. Seven of them are "out of commission"; that is, they have no crews. Two of them are "in reserve": that is, they have only about forty per cent. crews. Only nineteen of them are “in full commission." And of these nineteen, nine are in our Asiatic fleet. Moreover, almost all our gunboats are slow. Only three of them made as much as sixteen knots an hour on their original trips. We have one gunboat building. She was authorized on August 20, 1916. The last Navy List reports her with the double goose-egg. She is "Building, 0.0 per cent. complete." We shall not see many submarines slain by gunboats. They are not fit for this job.

TORPEDO BOATS.

Next we have "torpedo boats." They should be distinguished from destroyers. Destroyers, really modern ones, have a full

load displacement of from about 900 to about 1,300 tons. These “torpedo boats" have a full-load displacement of from 125 to 375 tons. They are bantams. That, however, is nothing against them. They are larger than our new projected official special ""submarine chasers." And they are fast. They made from 24 to 30 knots an hour on their trial trips. But they are not youthful any more as a class. Only two of them were launched as lately as 1901. They seem to be regarded as generally senile. Four of them are "out of commission." Eleven of them are "in ordinary”: that is, they have only about twenty-five per cent.. crews. One of them is in "reserve." Out of a total of seventeen, just one is "in full commission." Clearly the navy has not thought it worth while to get these boats ready to go out trawling for German tin-fish.

OLD DESTROYERS.

Our next class is called by the navy "Destroyers not serviceable for duty with the fleet." They were launched in 1900, 1901 and 1902. They are intermediate in size between “torpedo boats" and fleet-serving destroyers. They are not too old and they are fast. They all made twenty-eight or twenty-nine knots an hour on trial. They can be used in one way and another. But what has actually been done to get them ready? There are sixteen of them. Eight of them are "in reserve." They have not had full crews practising. Big boats like "armored cruisers," which are of no particular use to us in the war which has been impending over us for two years have had full crews practising. These small and potentially useful boats have not. That accounts for half of the sixteen. The remaining eight have been kept far away from any possible concerted practice against submarines in the Atlantic. Three of them are in the Pacific fleet. Five of them are with the Asiatic fleet, where they defy Von Tirpitz's veterans to break through their cordon and sink the Brooklyn, their revered twenty-one-yearold first class cruiser flagship. Our sixteen "Destroyers not serviceable for duty with the fleet" may conceivably be serviceable for various near-shore duties against submarines, but we are not likely to see them dashing into port with scalps at their bows at any early moment.

MODERN DESTROYERS.

We next come to our real fleet-serving destroyers. There are fifty-one of these. One is "out of commission" and two are "in ordinary"-which leaves forty-eight. Seventeen of these forty-eight were scheduled in the last Navy List as "operating with reduced complements." That means along about sixty per cent. crews. I repeat that we have found full crews for many boats of no genuine prospective use in our prospective war, but we have been unable to find full crews for many boats genuinely prospectively useful indeed.

Our fleet destroyers are splendid boats. All of them, except the three that are "out of commission" and "in ordinary" are attached to our Atlantic fleet. That includes the seventeen which have been "operating with reduced complements" as well as the

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thirty-one which are "in full commission." We have fortyeight excellent destroyers where they belong-in the Atlantic. The trouble is that our first-class all-big-gun battleships, if they ever move out of enclosed waters at all even for necessary occasional battle practice in the open sea, will want all-or almost all of these destroyers with them. We may be permitted to imagine, perhaps, that in certain circumstances a certain number of fleet-serving destroyers might be free to undertake a little anti-submarine activity for the protection of our commerce along our rather prolix coast from Canada to Mexico. But those certain circumstances and that certain number of destroyers would surely be uncertain in the extreme.

SCOUTS.

It

There is one remaining group of full sized regular-navy boats especially suited to the rapid protection of commerce. is a group called "scouts." There are three of them-the Chester, the Birmingham and the Salem. They are third-class cruisers tagged as "scouts" because of their speed. Among all our cruisers of all classes they are the only ones that made as much as twenty-four knots an hour on their trials. They are only ten years old. Each of them is assigned, under our published mobilization-stations plan, to be the flagship of one of our three flotillas of destroyers. But the Chester is "in reserve," and the Birmingham is "in reserve" and "under repairs," and the Salem is "out of commission." It is clear that they are not exactly straining at the leash with every muscle massaged to the minute. Moreover, if they were all fitted to go to sea and if they could be spared from their duties as flotilla flagships, they are quite too large to be risked on antisubmarine work. They are vessels of a full-load displacement of more than 500 tons

MOTOR BOATS

So we come to our new experiments. For a long time these experiments were confined to boats of pygmy size. Shortly after the war broke out Mr. William Washburn Nutting of the magazine called Motor Boat printed a picture of a very tiny motor boat furiously demolishing a periscope with gunfire from her hooded prow. This admirable prophecy was soon brought to a certain sort of general fulfilment on the other side of the Atlantic. Though motor boats might not demolish periscopes every minute, they were seen to have their uses-important uses. Our navy showed interest. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary, showed particular and enthusiastic interest. We placed orders (experimental ones) with our motor boat building yards calling upon them to show ingenuity in meeting our specified needs. In the end we sanctioned a forty-five foot boat from the Lawley yard in Massachusetts and a fifty-foot boat from the Greenport yard in Long Island a sixty-foot boat from the Luders yard in Connecticut and, from the yard of Murray and Tregurtha in Massachusetts, four or five venomous little things called "Viper Sea Sleds" which look like aborted barges and have noses as broad as their bellies and can make as much as forty knots an hour.

WASPS.

This was the era of boats not only pygmy in size but meteor in speed. It was the "wasp" era. We were to have a fleet of "wasps." And we could to-day make considerable use of a fleet of specially designed and specially strong "wasps" for inshore quiet-water protective patrol work. We did not get it. We did not even get all the few individual experimental boats for which we placed orders. The Luders boat had trouble with its engines; and the Greenport boat, too, had trouble with its engines; and they have never been accepted. There is a fatality about the specifications drawn up by Washington for the things it wants to buy. The Greenport yard can get engines that will go for foreign governments in boats that it sells to foreign governments; but it cannot get engines that will go properly for Washington. This cannot be because Washington is in America. Our navy has just bought a little sixty foot boat called the Chingachgook. It was built by the Greenport yard. But it was built purely privately. It was built, and we looked at it, and we bought it, and we have it. The one ordered specially for us a year ago we have not. The only notable result of the "wasp" era in the tale of ships in our regular public fleet, at the time we declared war on Germany, were the four or five "sea sleds,” the Lawley forty-five footer and the Chingachgook.

FAST PRIVATE YACHTS.

By that time we had gone on into our second and final era, in which we transferred our main interest to a boat much larger than a "wasp" and much slower. But, before speaking of that boat, we should pause to notice the popular notion that we can get "auxiliary" submarine-chasers by the myriad out of our great privately-owned fleet of pleasure motor-craft. It is a notion demonstrably erroneous.

Franklin D. Roosevelt has been as enthusiastic about small boats as anybody in the United States. From the beginning, so far as an outsider can make out, he has been a vigorous supporter of any and all means of getting ready to hit the submarine in the open sea and in bays and gulfs and sounds and narrows and rivers and rivulets. He is an effective young man because, among other reasons, he is an optimistic young man. Yet even he was obliged to tell the yacht-owners of New York that a motor boat, to be an “auxiliary," should be at least forty feet long. Now how many motor-boats have we that are forty feet long? A large number. The Yacht Register says 1,275. But where does that get us?

Let us assume that every one of these 1,275 boats, by the imposition of a three-pounder on its usually frail and at present utterly unsuitable deck, could be transformed into a real "wasp” with a real sting. Some twenty-five ready-made real "wasps" do indeed already exist among them. They were specially built by patriotic sporting owners on special designs officially approved by the Navy Department. Let us assume that all the rest of them can be "wasps," too. It is a frantic assumption. The mass of these boats will never strike a submarine in their

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lives. They may render invaluable non-combatant service; and we must have them; and they will deserve, and already have, our most grateful thanks; but it is onyl a small minority of them that ever will or ever can be real fighters. Let us, however, assume. Let us see 1,275 "auxiliary" submarine-chasers. Where are we then?

SPECIAL ANTI-SUBMARINES.

We are mostly in harbor. A boat has to be much more than forty feet long to be able to go after submarines in the open sea. The boats sent to England so numerously by our Elco yard for anti-submarine purposes are eighty-five feet long. The best technical naval opinion is that they should have been longer. That is why our new projected final submarine-chaser is one hundred and ten feet long. It is a boat of special design, of special shape and strength and general fitness for this special work, and yet it has to be one hundred and ten feet long. How many of our private motor boats are as much as one hundred feet long? Fifty-one. How many are as much as eighty feet long? One hundred and sixty-six, altogether. We shall see no avenging hordes of converted motor boats dashing around Cape Hatteras and Cape Cod day and night hunting submarines through Atlantic storms. They simply cannot do it. They will help us in-shore to be safe. Few of them, very few, will help us do the one thing we must in the end do-down our enemy in the open sea.

Surely it is manifest that our one hope is our official future one-hundred-and-ten-foot boats. I here ask just one question about these boats. How many of them are we going to get? It is understood that the Navy is laying down several score of them in its own yards. The private builders, when they met in Washington, were inclined to think, when most hopeful, that they could furnish 116 of them by the first of next January. Let us double their hopefulness. Let us even treble it. We shall still be dealing, public yards and private yards together, in mere hundreds.

NEED OF RAPID BUILDING.

Is it not clear that if we continue to deal in mere hundreds, we might almost as well have stayed out of the war? Four or five hundred submarine-chasers by the first of next January will not do much more than safeguard our own coast. Το defeat Germany in a reasonable length of time we must swamp the German submarine; and, to swamp the German submarine, we must deal in thousands of submarine-chasers-literally and inevitably thousands. And we must go where the submarines are. They are, and always will be, at their thickest and at their most damaging to our commerce and to our peace in the waters about the island on which live those most disagreeable persons the British. Unless we plunge in alongside those most disagreeable persons and proceed to swamp submarines where submarines are, with anti-submarine craft of all types needed, in thousands as required, we shall find next January that the German submarine commanders, so far as anything