Millions for Sea Monsters

What argufies snivelling and piping your eye?

--18th Century British Sea Chanty

Throngs of teary Germans gathered forlorn on the Hamburg waterfront when fire gutted the Fatherland's superliner Europa as she lay abuilding (TIME, April 8). They knew that Britons, with whom the Europa was chiefly insured, would pay for her reconstruction and put her on the Atlantic to wrest speed supremacy from the British Mauretania. All the same, they gloomed.

Last week Britons by the thousand wrote letters to the Cunard Line. They knew that Depression forced Cunard to stop work fortnight ago on the super-super-liner that was to have wrested Atlantic supremacy back from Germany (TIME. Dec. 21). They knew that this half-born British sea monster (her embryonic name: No. 534) was not insured in Germany or anywhere else against Depression. Typically British, the thousands of letter writers made no moan, bade Cunard lo take courage and finish what Britons had begun. These brisk letter-writers, including many an old lady, finally overwhelmed Cunard Chairman Sir Percy Elly Bates with offers of money which, in some cases, was enclosed in the form of crisp Bank of England notes. For the Cunard Board of Directors there was but one British thing to do. They met under Sir Percy's chairmanship at Liverpool and voted to complete their -L-6,000,000 ship on which -L-1,000,000 has already been spent.

This did not mean that the 3,000 British shipwrights thrown out of work at John Brown & Co.'s Clydebank yards fortnight ago when Cunard stopped construction went back to work last week. Having voted their determination, the Cunard Board had next to look for money. Said Sir Percy: "Patriotic offers of a public Joan will not be overlooked. . . . There are other possibilities. . . ."

The British Government, busy reducing expenses, made no visible move to aid Cunard last week, but the French Government continued its subsidy to the French Line which kept 1,500 men at work all week at St. Nazaire putting 55 tons of steel per day into the hull of the super-super-ship with which they will challenge Cunard's. (Both liners will be "faster than the fastest and larger than the largest" now extant.) Up to last week the French Line had put roughly three times more money than Cunard into actual construction, namely 300,000,000 francs null Suggested name for the Ile de France's super-super-sister: Normandy, since that province fronts the Atlantic and appeals most romantically, with or without roses, to U. S. citizens.

In Paris the fact that nearly all the great trans-Atlantic lines are losing money suddenly inspired the new French Minister of Marine, precise, rational Vicomte Louis de Chappedelaine, to propose last week not another Naval Limitation Conference but the world's first Merchant Ship Limitation Conference.

In French Senate and Chamber circles the de Chappedelaine plan received prompt, warm support last week, seemed likely to be taken up by the French Foreign Office for diplomatic presentation to the Great Powers. "We must halt the insane race for greater speeds and excessive tonnage," puffed Senator A. A. Rio, Chairman of the Senate Marine Commission. "The danger is evident and can become mortal.''

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