Excerpt from Farm and Fireside, Vol. 43: The National Farm Magazine; January, 1919 From practically nothing we bid fair to have afloat by the end of this year more than twenty million tons of merchant shippingma fleet as great as England's at the outbreak of the war. Excluding the fleets of ocean - going tugs, and the dead-weight tons of steel, wood, and concrete barges on the program, we have planned for more than two thousand ships. To day they are sliding from the ways all over the United States. Germany miscalculated. Up on the crippling of the world's available tonnage she depended for winning the war. She overlooked the possibility of a contented, non maritime nation like America suddenly erecting shipways at every possible port, standardizing the materials and building methods for these ships, and launching them at a rate heretofore unheard of. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.