ABSTRACT
The enormous increase in the world's consumption of petroleum since the war has afforded a real economic justification for the increase of the world's tanker fleets from about a million and a quarter to about nine million tons. The revival of prosperity in the shipping industry depends upon a revival of world trade, and the industry itself is so largely international in its operations that there are very definite limits to what any one country can do either in facilitating the conduct of the business or in raising its social standards. The competition of such ships is grossly unfair to shipowners who are competing solely on the intrinsic merits of their services, and in the long run it is definitely injurious to world trade. Flag discrimination, in whatever form and however carefully applied, inevitably involves a waste of carrying power and a burden on the world's commerce.
