PANAMA CANAL AND AMERICAN COMMERCE. 75 
charges. Such is the present practice of Norway in respect of Suez Canal tolls. 
Some nations will appropriate money directly for the payment of the Panama Canal 
tolls of vessels under their flags respectively as Russia and Austria have paid the 
Suez Canal tolls of some of their ships. Other nations will vote subsidies to national 
mail steamships, adequate to pay their Panama Canal tolls, as Spain has already 
done in anticipation of a Spanish line to Valparaiso, and as Great Britain, Germany 
and Japan have done for years in behalf of contract mail steamships passing through 
the Suez Canal. The right to spend our own money as we wish will not be disputed 
and if the Congress of the United States shall see fit to declare it the policy of the 
country to pay directly from the Treasury the Panama Canal tolls of American 
vessels of commerce as well as of American vessels of war, indisputably it can do 
so consistently with scrupulous regard for all of our international obligations. 
Whether it be judicious to tax the whole people for American navigation of the 
Canal rather than to tax American vessels and thus indirectly the cotton, corn, 
lumber, fruits and manufactured products which we send through the Canal, is 
a question to be determined in the halls of Congress and not before international 
tribunals. 
That proposition is the basic principle of the last great public measure, intro- 
duced by one whose public services in behalf of American navigation have for 
years commanded the respect of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine 
Engineers, the late William P. Frye, Senator from Maine and long President pro 
tempore of the Senate. The Frye Bill provides:— 
“Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States 
of America in Congress assembled, That all tolls and transit charges which may 
hereafter be imposed on public vessels of the United States and on merchant 
vessels of the United States for passing through the Panama Canal shall be paid 
from any money in the Treasury not otherwise appropriated, and there are hereby 
appropriated annually, out of any money in the Treasury not otherwise appro- 
priated, such sums as may be necessary for the purpose; and such appropriations 
shall be deemed permanent annual appropriations.” 
Though novel perhaps in form, the bill in principle has been the unchallenged 
policy of the United States fora quarter of acentury. Since July 1, 1884, Congress 
has voted $527,065,707 for the construction and maintenance of river and harbor 
improvements. ‘These great expenditures have made possible the building in 
Great Britain of the commercial masterpieces of naval architecture, whose dis- 
tinguished designer is to be honored by the American engineering societies at the 
coming meeting. To those appropriations the builders of the Great Lakes have 
been indebted for the chance to develop the most efficient type of the cargo-boat 
to be found on any water. Those hundreds of millions have contributed by reduc- 
ing the cost of transportation to develop our domestic commerce and in foreign 
trade to lower in effect the tariffs of nations. It would have been well within the 
