Touchstone

Steel boats-900 bottoms in varying sizes-lie listless in U.S. estuaries. It cost about one billion dollars to make them and it costs the U. S. about $2,700,000 to keep them from one Christmas to the next.

Many a keen industrialist who keeps his eyes on things has proposed to buy them for scrap at scrap prices. But all was not generally known until the Chairman of the Shipping Board ("T. V. O'C.") made a speech, last week, to some travelers on a boat plying between Detroit and Buffalo.

Mr. O'Connor simply said he had had audience with Henry Ford, from whom he had wrung a tentative offer to take 400 of the listless bottoms at something between $1 and $7 per ton (scrap price). At $3 per ton, the entire listless fleet of 5,700,000 tons would bring about $17,000,000. Mr. Ford would probably pay about half that for about half the fleet-all is quite vague. Mr. Ford thought he might use 30 or perhaps only 10 for commerce; the rest for junk.

Henry Ford is one of the most inveterate bargain-hunters in the country. Old inns, old sap-buckets, old railways delight him. Particularly, he has been interested in dilapidated things which the Government has vainly clung to. Refused Muscle Shoals on his own terms, he now considers the idle fleet. Selling things to Mr. Ford, however, is no royal road to fortune.

His offer aroused little enthusiasm among the other members of the Shipping Board. It was received with some favor by business men, one of whom hoped that the Shipping Board would follow the boats into the junk pile: "Let the tail go with the hide." Furtively, shipowners, native and foreign, prayed for the demolition of the ships because, bad as they are, they constitute a vaguely potential threat of competition.

*Said Mr. Ford to the press: "Why, do you know it will cost us approximately $400,000 to get ready to pull the ships apart."