Rationalized Skips

The heads of the British merchant marine, representatives of six fleets totaling 52 trans-Atlantic liners valued at $275,000,000, gathered in London last week, emerged with a weighty pronouncement: because of the falling off in Atlantic trade and passenger traffic, the Cunard,

White Star, Red Star, Anchor, Canadian Pacific and Atlantic Transport lines have agreed to a "rationalization" scheme to cut down expenses, avoid overlapping service, remove wasteful competition among themselves.

The shipping tycoons wished it to be understood that this was by no means a merger of British lines such as has been insistently hinted ever since Hamburg-American and North German Lloyd cut out competitive sailings, elected unified boards of directors last spring. The British scheme is a "gentleman's agreement." The Britons frankly admitted that one of the most important objects was to fight German, French, Dutch competition in the North Atlantic. Whether this "gentleman's agreement" would grow into something considerably stronger, they refused to prophesy. Immediate results: next week only one ship of the six "rationalized" lines will leave Liverpool for the U. S., only two will sail from Southampton, only one from Glasgow. Four British ships per week will leave the Port of New York, instead of the twelve that sail in the height of the summer season, the seven which sailed last week.

The scheme has obvious advantages for the British lines concerned. It holds obvious disadvantages for certain other folk.

Several of the 52 ships affected by the agreement will be transferred to other runs but some will be laid up for the remainder of the winter. Not a few British seamen will thus be thrown out of work.

Great object of the agreement is that not more than one ship of the combine shall sail from a given port on a given day. This will affect hordes of longshoremen, freight handlers, railwaymen, harbor workers.

Moreover, tourists sailing on nearly-empty steamers in the off season have become accustomed to receiving luxury accommodations for the minimum fare. With the number of sailings so drastically cut this pleasant custom must end.

Officials of German, French, Dutch and U. S. competing companies professed to regard the British rationalization scheme complacently, pointed out that curtailed British sailings during the winter will mean just that much less competition by British ships against theirs.

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