Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/481

Rh the demands for an amalgamation of artistic and technical features.

It will be seen at once that a commercial harbor offers a number of facilities for the shipping trade, and would practically solve important phases of our transportation problem, but it will at the same time be observed that it is in contrast to our commercial system, developed with the presumption that it should make competition and establishment of new firms as difficult as possible. The establishment of a new steamship line, to take an example, means under the present conditions the acquisition of harbors both for terminals and for stations on the route, and the firm that establishes it will know that railroad connections of only the most primitive sort can be had unless considerable capital is sacrificed. Hence a business venture of this sort will run into proportions that will prevent small firms or beginners from entering into it, and will when made be less beneficial to the public, which in the end must pay the expenses. If commercial harbors were the rule, any shipowner with ability to secure paying cargo could start a line and drop it again, incurring little responsibility. This ease of access soon furnishes the necessary daring to the commercial navy, without which competition with other seafaring nations is of little avail.

The fact that the two typical harbors named above, besides being commercial harbors, are also free harbors—that is, places in which goods from foreign countries can be taken in, worked over, refined, or repacked for shipment to other markets, without passing national custom lines—may have obscured their general commercial character and prevented this from becoming publicly known here. Their importance as promoters of commerce and industry ought to be thoroughly studied, not only as technical—as engineering—works, but especially as solutions of social, commercial, and industrial problems.

A third promoter of the trust is our lack of convenient and adequate market-places. We have so little idea of the uses to which a market-place is put that we seem to have almost entirely forgotten what it really is or what it looks like. We are ready to call any large retail bazaar or street in which a number of