interests of the States in this great work are too important to admit of any other than a spirit of friendly accord and perfect justice in composing any disagreement.

Under the reservations in the concessions, which are recognized in the charter and are the basis of that legislation, the stock reserved to Nicaragua is 6 per cent, the stock reserved to the promoters is 6 per cent, and the stock reserved to Costa Rica is 1 per cent of the entire amount of the stock of the company.

Deducting this 13 per cent from the whole capital stock, the remainder, or 84 per cent, went into the treasury of the company.

The charter of the company, which the bill herewith reported is intended to amend, fixed the capital stock of the company at $200,000,000. The proposed amendment reduces the capital stock to $100,000,000.

The opinion seems to have gained much weight through discussion that it is better that the stock of this company should be owned exclusively by the three Republics.

There are strong reasons for the contention that private enterprise and personal caution and watchfulness would be valuable safeguards in the expenditure of money and in the management of the canal; but the more strenuous opinion is that the ownership of stock in the canal by private persons would lead to some objectionable results, and that a board of directors chosen from our citizens would secure the safe and conservative prosecution and administration of this great trust.

In this bill private ownership of the stock is completely eliminated, and Congress may hereafter authorize it, if it is found to be the better policy. In the structure of this bill there is careful provision for the extinguishment of the interests of all the present stockholders in the company.

There is no room left for the charge that this measure is intended to benefit those who have promoted and fostered this great work at great risk, with years of honest and assiduous labor and the expenditure of millions of dollars. If such an objection was tenable, even in appearance, it could reflect no discredit upon the honorable names that are identified with this the most important work of this age.

But it is only their due, when it is stated that no body of American citizens have ever labored more earnestly for the welfare and honor of their country, or with a more self-sacrificing spirit, than the promoters and the stockholders and the directors of the Maritime Canal Company of Nicaragua, among whom there are men of eminence in the most honorable pursuits. They cheerfully yield their interests and rights to the higher duty of supporting a great policy for the benefit of the American people.

The Governments of Nicaragua and Costa Rica have had some disappointments as to the apparently slow progress of the work under their concessions, and are restive at the delay.

Their disagreements as to their boundary line along the San Juan

River have had much to do with this delay, and their contentions in warfare have seriously discouraged capital from making investments in the stocks or bonds of the canal company, and have greatly embar rassed the surveys of the United States.

The Congress of the United States, in both branches, has been industriously at work to examine carefully into all the engineering and other problems that seemed to demand further full and scientific investigation connected with this canal. Besides the close surveys of the ablest engineers, made at the cost of the United States and of the canal company, two commissions have been sent to Nicaragua and Costa Rica to make still more thorough and exhaustive surveys,

The second commission, under Admiral Walker, has not yet finished the work of obtaining data for the final and exact estimate of the cost of the canal. In these labors and expenses neither of the other Governments has made any contribution, nor have they prevented obstructions to the surveys, although their future prosperity is bound up in the success of the canal, which they can never construct without the aid of the United States.

It is a most reasonable expectation, and it is cordially entertained, that these States will, in a spirit of justice, respond to the sincere efforts of the United States to establish the great highway of nations that will make these Republics rich and powerful peoples.

Already the practical and irrevocable concert of mutual legislation, diplomatic agreement, and cooperation has bound the three States to a future line of conduct which neither of them can rightfully withdraw from, or change, except by express agreement, nor can it be abandoned without responsibility on the part of each of the three Governments toward the others.

The United States regards these incidents with the same respect, and their attendant obligations with as sincere a purpose of compliance, as if they had been formulated in the solemnity of treaty engagements; and a corresponding course will be confidently expected on the part of the other States.

This growth of mutual rights, interests, and duties had its origin in the invitation of Nicaragua, made to the United States, in the terms of the concessions granted to Mr. Menocal and his associates, and by their insistence, wherein our Government was appealed to as the proper and contemplated authority to give chartered rights and privileges to the Maritime Canal Company, and to give it the credit that would necessarily follow from our national recognition of the enterprise.

Congress answered this appeal in a spirit of national generosity, and gave to those concerned, including Nicaragua and Costa Rica, the benefit of a national indorsement as to the good faith and the fair prospects of their success, but took care, with the consent of these States, to reserve and maintain over this corporation, in which independent republics were stockholders, the power to alter, amend, or repeal the charter at its will, and the clear political and legislative power to call the corporation to account to the United States at any time, through

sworn reports in respect of its condition and its conduct, in all respects. This charter was accepted by the corporation and by the two Republics, and is a law to them, so long as it exists.

Under this law both the Republics, as stockholders in this corporation, have been regularly represented in the board of directors, selecting their ministers accredited to this Government as their delegates.

The United States has received from the officers of the company annual reports under oath, which, under the law, have been transmitted to Congress by the Secretary of the Interior.

This political and legislative control over the Nicaraguan Canal has been at the instance and with the consent of the two Republics of Nicaragua and Costa Rica; and under the right thus accorded to the United States our Government has made several costly surveys of the line of the canal and the adjacent country without having asked the consent of either of those States.

Under our treaties, as well as in virtue of this legislative situation, which is recognized fully in diplomatic correspondence, the United States has the right to send troops to the line of the canal and in the field of its surveys to repress violence that would interrupt the work, even if a state of open public war existed there between Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

Under such conditions the abandonment by the United States of the rights thus established and secured is a result that can have no support in reason or justice unless we intend to abandon the canal.

When a bill was under discussion in the Fifty-fourth Congress for aiding in the construction of the Nicaraguan Canal, an objection was made to that measure by the diplomatic representative of a Diet, called the Greater Republic of Central America, to the effect that the ownership of a majority of the stock in the canal by the United States was equivalent to the ownership of the concessions of Nicaragua and Costa Rica by a foreign government, which would violate the terms of the concessions.

Without discussing the right of this Diet, whose constituents are Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, to intrude into a subject which does not necessarily concern that diplomatic agency, it is very clear that the concessions give a right to the ownership of stock in the canal company to foreign governments, and invites them to subscribe for the stock without any limit as to the amount that any government may take.

This privilege is certainly open to the United States, whose legislation is depended upon for all the charter rights and powers under which the canal is to be constructed.

The restriction, as to the sale of the concessions by the concessionaires, while the sale of stock is left without any restriction, indicates very clearly the purpose of this provision, which is to reserve to Nicaragua and Costa Rica the full exercise of their just powers in the declaration and enforcement of a forfeiture of the concessions without

being thereby brought into conflict with the rights of any sovereign power that might, in the absence of such a provision, become the owner of the concessions.

After the United States shall have become the owner of $70,000,000 of the stock of the canal, under this bill, if it becomes a law, Nicaragua and Costa Rica would still have all the rights they now possess as to declaring and enforcing a forfeiture of the concessions for breach of their conditions, unless they have yielded these rights and powers, or shall yield them, to the United States by some other means, not connected with its ownership of stock in the canal.

If the United States becomes a stockholder in this canal company, the relation between such stockholder and any other stockholder or the company will be the same, under the concessions and under the charter, that would attend the ownership of stock by any private · person.

It is further objected that the Maritime Canal Company is a private corporation, and that the United States should not become a stockholder in such a corporation. Under the provisions of the bill herewith reported three sovereign republics will own 77 per cent of the capital stock of the corporation in their own right and an equal percentage of any stock not disposed of and left in the treasury of the company.

The purposes of the corporation are not only public, but they are international, and are affected with uses and trusts that include and establish the equal privileges of all nations engaged in commerce, and each of the governments concerned in the ownership of stock in the canal company has declared that it is a public work.

The constitutionality and the usefulness in government of corporations that are even private enterprises have been often affirmed in our legislation and in judicial proceedings in our highest courts. Instances are multiplied in our history in which this policy has been wisely adopted.

In the charters, and in the subsidizing of turnpike roads and canals, and in the Bank of the United States, in which the United States held stock; and in the charter and subsidies to the transcontinental railroads, in which the Government had directors without any holding of stock; and in the creation of national banks and the control of them as fiscal agencies of the Government, without having either stock or directors, we have sufficiently demonstrated the propriety of this policy and the usefulness of corporate bodies as instruments and facilities of gov ernmental administration.

The railroads and steamship lines that carry our mails are private corporations, but we have found it necessary to use and control them, without actual agreement with them, under severe criminal laws, in order to secure their services for the Government. We must do this or else we must own these vehicles of commerce, and where the exactions upon them are too heavy, we aid them with subsidies to enable them to serve the needs of the Government without loss.

It is too late to question the right or the policy of the United States to give aid to a caual company, even if it was only a private enterprise, in opening a ship canal through the Isthmus of Darien, which, in time of war, is a necessary means of defending the country, and in peace will be a blessing to every person in the United States, while at all times it is a necessary facility for conducting our Government.

The effort to portray the blessings that will result to the world, and to the Western Hemisphere, in a special sense, from this canal, and the peculiar advantages of its control in promoting the welfare of the United States, and the honor it will confer on our country and the men of this generation are beyond the reach of our present forecast and must be left to the historian.

While we have been debating this subject in Congress, and have been balked and delayed by competing lines of land transportation and by the intermeddling of the agents of competitive water lines of transportation, the ship canals at Corinth, Greece, at Manchester, England, and at Kiel, in Germany, have been projected and completed, to the great honor and advantage of those countries.

Yet our resources have been so ample that we have kept $100,000,000 idle in the Treasury, on which the people have paid interest during all this time, in order to protect our credit, which has stood at from 15 to 25 per cent premium in the markets during this entire period.

If this $100,000,000 had been used, as we have used a like sum in aiding the Union and Central Pacific railways, and as this measure proposes to employ the money so used, now that it is being returned to the Treasury, the people of the United States would now have the canal for the relief of their industries from an enormous burden, for transportation that is constantly growing, and to add to our power and the security of our coasts in time of war.

It is left to the discretion of the President in this bill that he may employ the sums of money arising from the sales of the subsidized railroads, instead of borrowing money by the sale of bonds, for the construction of the canal.

The earnings of the canal will pay to the stock held by the United States a sum that will soon redeem the bonds and will leave this fund for future use in the construction of other great public works, of which there are some in prospect that must soon become works of emergency.

The committee find no occasion for increasing the estimate of the cost of the canal above the sum stated in their last report to the Senate. On the contrary, there are very strong reasons for the reduction of those estimates by the sum of ten to fifteen million dollars. The statements of the canal commissioners appended to this report show great reductions in the cost of the canal by the shorter lines of dredging in Lake Nicaragua, by the reduction of more than one-half in the rock blasting in San Juan River, and in other important items of savings. Adopting the calculations in their last report, it is clear that the