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July, 1910 methods. The cruiser fleet comes in for overhauling and when it goes, a large number of men have to be dis- charged. Some of? the - work 1, "of course, done by the ship's force, as fee lvays been .the rule. We have had opportunity to. see some .of it oat oi this subject the less said the better. 2 The dollars have been saved in repair work statement that thousands of by having repair shops on shipboard is merely moonshine. The policy in this respect has not been changed in the slightest degree under the present administration. Long before Secre- tary Meyer began rattling around in the navy department each ship was fitted with a small shop and these ships still have their' shops and no others. : The credit, that:.is claimed for~ the new administration for training men the most When Chief Con- structor Capps was made active chief in. marine engineering is amusing of all. of the bureau of marine engineering he imme- diately brought this subject. to the latter's attention and outlined a course by Secretary Newberry, of three years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His recom- mendation was approved by Mr. New- berry and a general order was issued for the establishment of the school and officers were invited to make re- quests for detail. Mr. Newberry went out of office. Mr. Very shortly after this Capps' plan is being carried out ab- solutely except that the location of the school was changed from an out- side institution to the naval academy, which progressive naval officers con- sider to be a mistake, for the reason that not only would the instruction at Boston have been very mugh_bet- ter, but the officers detailed would have rubbed shoulders with the out- side world, and this experience, of which they stand in sad need, would have been of great value. So long as the navy is dominated by Secretary Meyer or others of his type it will fall short of fulfilling the ideals of what a navy should be. TAE Marine. REVIEW FOREIGN SHIPPING INTERESTS AND THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. If the Merchant Marine League in- vestigation has done nothing else, it has opened wide the eyes of the reading public as to the lengths and reaches that the foreign shipping interests will go to mold, influence, direct and control shipping. The fact that it had on its pay roll one of the managers of the Associated Press in Washington was as electrifying and illuminating as American a flash of lightning across a dark sky. [t was not expected that it would seek to mold public opinion right at its foun- How of a character hostile to tain head; yet. it is so. much information American shipping interests has _ been disseminated through this agency during the past ten years; how much informa- tion of a character favorable to Amer- ican shipping interests has been withheld and suppressed during the past ten years must be left to one's imagination. It certainly throws much light upon a fact, hitherto puzzling, that the Associated Press was carrying so little in its col- umns from day to day of the Merchant Marine League inquiry. It appeared as though the activities of the Associated Press were growing less as the cause of American shipping grew stronger. It came as a shock to the unsophisti- cated public that for the past ten years Jerome J. Wilbur, who has been for 25 years connected with the Associated Press. in Washington and at present assigned to the State War and Navy Building, had been in the employ of two leading foreign steamship companies, the Hamburg-American Line and the North German Lloyd Steamship Co: Mr. Wil- bur was reluctant to state what his compensation was, but Mr. Emil Boas, managing director of the Hamburg- American Line, stated that it was $3,000 per annum, of which sum one-half was contributed by his company and _ the other half by the North German Lloyd. Apparently the Associated Press has something of that philosophy commonly credited to France, that crime consists solely in being found out, for the officers of that immediately issued a statement that Mr. Wilbur's resignation had been tendered and ac- For ten long years the Asso- concern cepted. 277 ciated Press knew of its representative's connection with foreign shipping inter- ests; but it could not rest under the publicity of this indictment for ten min- utes. John P. Gavitt, the Washington manager of the Associated Press, rushed before the committee without a sum- mons to say that he knew and approved of Wilbur's employment by the foreign shipping interests, but did not believe that such connection affected the relia- Then the Associated Press followed it up with a bility of the news service. statement saying that it having come to the knowledge of the officers of the Associated Press that such a connection existed they had requested Wilbur's res- ighation, not that he had done anything wrong, but that the knowledge of such his Doubtless it impaired his usefulness as connection usefulness. impaired an impartial collector and distributor of news, but not more so now than ten years ago. The Associated Press cer- tainly does: not come out of this affair unscathed. Coincident with these disclosures came a remarkable speech from Congressman Humphrey, in which -he declared that the North German Lloyd in 1898 volun-= tarily withdrew from its merchant serv- ice two of its fastest and best steamships. and sold them to Spain for the purpose of preying upon American commerce. on the seas, the self-same company that for a dozen years has been carrying a Washington representative of the As- Did the Associated Press. pay any attention to sociated Press on its pay roll. . this sensational disclosure of Congress- man Humphrey? Not a line of it was. carried. TAKE THE POLITICS OUT OF THE DEEP WATERWAYS MOVEMENT .. In the June issue of THE Marine ReE- VIEW we urged adoption of sane en- gineering and business methods in dealing with the deep waterways pro- jects of the middle west, and pointed out that it is only through the use of that the propaganda can be. expected to make these methods waterways any permanent headway. A pointed example of the wrong way of handling this matter--making it a subject for political jugglery--is