4 SPECIAL MAY MEETING. 
first ten bills that were passed by Congress, were in connection with shipping. From that 
time on no country on earth had a greater opportunity of being the maritime power of the 
world than had this country. Unfortunately, and without criticism, because I presume those 
men did the best they could, either through over-confidence of our ability or because perhaps 
of foreign relations, we gradually let slip from us what we had. 
In 1848, when we allowed the English nation to enter into our indirect trade, we built 
a cemetery for our ships. However, the eyes of the country had turned in another direction; 
the discovery of gold in California in the forties and the vast number of people, caravans, 
crossing the country, had turned the eyes of the people to the development of the west. Im- 
mediately the financial powers, and, I presume, the people, asked of Congress the opening 
up of the west. 
The country was not rich, we had had a Civil War on our hands, and we did not feel that 
we had too much money; but Congress subsidized the railroads of this country to build up 
the west, and the most amazing thing to me, gentlemen, is that the farmers of the west, 
who are living today off the subsidy that was paid by Congress to put the railroads through 
to give them their farms and the opportunity to market their products, are the people who 
are kicking about subsidizing the merchant marine. 
Going back over the list, I find that almost every community paid a railroad to come 
to it; that nearly every state and municipality paid a railroad to come to it; that the National 
Government, besides putting out money, granted to these railroads 210,000,000 acres of 
ground to build them up. And the very men who come today to Congress and say, “We 
cannot stand a subsidy for the ships,” are the very men who are benefiting off the legislation 
and the subsidy passed by Congress at that time for railroads. 
I am going to go back to the bill. When we started last fall to find out what legisla- 
tion was necessary—and I would like to explain to you that we could not start before last 
fall for the simple reason that nobody knew where the Shipping Board stood until that time, 
notwithstanding the fact that Mr. McAdoo and Mr. Hurley and a number of other of those 
prominent gentlemen who were identified with shipping had made marvelous speeches around 
the country as to the way we were building up our tremendous merchant marine. I doubt 
very much whether they ever knew very much about it. It took us six or eight months to 
clean the thing up,—and I am not talking politics now; anybody who took charge would 
have had the same trouble. When we began to get some idea of where we stood, we tried 
to find out what could be done with the material in hand. Fortunately, we did not have 
to look for ships; we had them. Heretofore we had had to subsidize companies beforehand 
so that they would get ships; this time we had ships that we could start with. 
So the first thing that appeared to us was this; in subsidizing before we had subsi- 
dized individual companies or individuals, and in doing so had led to such scandals that we 
had made the question of a subsidy for ships unpopular. The second thing was that, if we 
were going to pay a subsidy, we did not want to pay it forever; we wanted to give these ships 
as much indirect aid as we could possibly do under the law, or make a law for it, and in doing 
so, after we had established their lines, we hoped we would not have to continue giving a 
subsidy forever. 
So the bill that is before us today was drawn up with this idea in view: first, that there 
should be no favorites in getting a subsidy; second, that we would give all the indirect aids 
that we could, so that eventually these indirect aids would carry the shipping without the 
assistance of a subsidy. 
