'Worst Year"

For 90 years Britons have adventured out to India and returned a-homing upon steamers bearing the triliteral device, "P. & O." Not the Bank of England is more symbolic of British fiscal solidarity than the chunky, workaday steam packets of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co. "Gawd! I wisht I had a quid for every mile them 'P. & O.'s 'as steamed this year!" is an invocation not seldom heard along docks. Last week the incredible was revealed. The Directors of the P. & O. also wish that they had "a quid" (-L-1=$4.85) for every mile their ships steamed in 1925. Instead, for 16,450,000 miles of steaming, the company can show a profit of only "two bob" (2 shillings=24.5c each) per mile./- As President of the Board of the P. & O., James Lyle Mackay, First Viscount Inchcape of Strathnaver, 73, unchallenged maritime seigneur,** deigned to make no statement last week when the P. & O. balance sheet flashed over the cables. For him spoke his son-in-law, the Hon. Alexander Shaw, a Director of the Bank of England and of the P. & O.: "1925 was the worst year for British shipping on record." Corroborative statistics released by the Cunard Line show a profit for that proverbially well managed concern of only $1,600,000 for 1925. The truth is that the supply of freight bottoms has so disastrously exceeded the demand that freight rates are no higher than in 1913, whereas freight costs have nearly doubled. A pound of meat may be shipped 6,000 miles from Argentina to England for one British penny (2c). Last week 85 British cargo companies with a total capital of -L-30,927,835 ($150,000,000) reported profits for last year of less than 4%.

As everyone knows, the U. S. Shipping Board sustained a net loss of $30,000,000 last year (TIME, May 17, BUSINESS).

/-Total 1925 profits $8,300,000. Total assets $160,000,000. **Senior partner in half a dozen of the chief British Oriental steamship companies, Vice President of the Suez Canal Co., for the past three decades chairman or a member of a round two score of governmental committees charged with everything from signing a Commercial Treaty with China (1899) to selling German warships allotted to Britain under the Treaty of Versailles, still active.