Discriminating Duties and Their Bearing on the American Merchant Marine

One of the most urgent problems before the American people to-day is the upbuilding end maintaining of an adequate merchant marine for national defense and for commerce. Discriminating duties are extra or additional duties levied by one nation against the ships, or the products (or both) of another nation when these enter the ports of the first nation. The whole idea is, that the country enacting these discriminations against the vessels of competing nations, thus raising their costs of carriage, hopes by so doing, to force cargoes into its own ships.The United States used these discriminating duties for many years in its early history. It placed tonnage duties upon the ships themselves, and levied commodity duties upon the cargoes. Tonnage duties were made higher upon foreign ships than upon native ships, and import duties were higher upon goods carried in foreign ships than upon the same kinds of goods when transported by American ships. The purpose of this thesis is to determine whether or not the Merchant Marine and American trade and shipping would be benefited were a discriminating duty policy put into effect at the present time.