The
payments in this class were to be made on contracts for a year at a
time, renewable from year to year; and no vessel was to receive them for
a longer period than ten years. The retainers to officers and men of the
merchant marine and deep-sea fishing-ships as inducements to enroll as
naval volunteers, were fixed at rates ranging from a hundred dollars a
year for the master or chief engineer of a large steamship to
twenty-five dollars for a sailor or fireman, and fifteen dollars for a
boy, these retainers being independent of their regular pay. The
provisions relating to tonnage revenue increased the tonnage taxes on
all vessels, American and foreign, entering American ports, with a
rebate of eighty per cent of the tonnage duties allowed to American
ships carrying American boys as apprentices and training them in
seamanship or engineering for the merchant service and naval
reserve.[HU]
The minority report, signed by three of the four Democratic members of
the commission, although outlining measures of relief which, in the
judgment of the signers, would "accomplish substantial and permanent
good without injustice to any other American interest and without doing
violence to any fundamental principle of right or of organic law,"
proposed no bill.
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