To the Congress of the United States: I transmit herewith, for the information of Congress, a report of the Secretary of State, respecting tonnage duties levied at Martinique and Guadaloupe on American vessels and on French vessels from those islands to the United States.

Tonnage table, hundredweight, quarters, and pounds expressed as decimal equivalent of a gross ton for use with the Monroe adding-calculator.

They are masters of the situation, pay no duties except tonnage dues, which are paid by them at about one-third of the amount paid by native vessels of the same burthen!

New Regulations for Pilotage, Rules for the Joint Investigation (Chinese and Consular) of Disputed Customs Cases, Rules for Coolie Emigration, each in turn claimed his attention, and it was he also who arranged with the Chinese that one-tenth of the tonnage duesafterwards raised to seven-tenthsshould be devoted to port improvements and lighting the coasts.

Yet our experience has proved that a revenue consisting so largely of imposts and tonnage ebbs and flows to an extraordinary extent, with all the fluctuations incident to the general commerce of the world.

Though the navigation in this Republic, coastwise, now employs a tonnage equalling that used in all the commerce of any other nation of Christendom, England alone excepted, it was of no great amount at the commencement of the eighteenth century.

At the same time, it gives me pain, sir, to be obliged to announce to you that the complaints of our merchants on the subject of the tonnage duty increase, and that they have excited not only the attention of the King but that of several departments of the Kingdom.

If it be the opinion that it is advantageous for us to close with France in her interpretation of a reciprocal and perpetual exemption from tonnage, a repeal of so much of the tonnage law will be the answer.

The greatest previous tonnage loss was during the Japanese-Russian war.

The tonnage requirements of the squadron and its 'auxiliaries' for a full six months' period would be about 74,000, without fresh water.

At the time the vote on the powers of the Secretary of the Treasury was taken, the tariff bill and the tonnage bill were still pending, and Hamilton's influence operated against Madison's views on some points.

It is perhaps as well that the nation generally remained to a great extent unconscious of the extreme gravity of the situation which developed during the Great War, when the Germans were sinking an increasing volume of merchant tonnage week by week.

A tonnage bounty of thirty shillings a ton was at this time given to the owners of busses or decked vessels for the encouragement of the white herring fishery.

No longer need vessels of heavy tonnage desert the Tyne for the Wear, as they were perforce driven to do during the first half of the nineteenth century, for the Wearsiders had set about deepening and widening their river long before the Tynesiders did the same by theirs.