80 PANAMA CANAL AND AMERICAN COMMERCE. 
of freight, and you cannot increase the rate of freight without losing that business, 
especially as you pay much higher wages for your labor, and I do not see how you 
will get any particular advantage by getting a rebate of these Canal dues. This 
is a personal opinion, and I have only put it out as the other side of the story. 
THE PRESIDENT:—Is there any further discussion of the paper? If not, we 
will ask Mr. Nixon to close the discussion. 
Mr. Nixon:—In the first place, the last speaker said he did not believe in 
encouraging enterprise. I want to say that the great enterprise on the oceans is 
encouraged to the extent of $42,000,000 by our foreign competitors. He says he 
thinks we might as well give up, since our wages are so high. We will never do 
anything unless we start somewhere. Here is a chance—we have a Canal, backed 
by our own people with our own money, and which is constructed through our own 
territory. There was a veiled insinuation that possibly two can play at the same 
game. If we go through the Suez Canal we pay. Other nations have been able 
to get by foresight, shares in the Suez Canal which return to them in profits 
what they pay for rebates in ships. We are to spend $400,000,000 on the Canal, 
and we say we will collect tolls, not to make it a profitable enterprise, but as an 
altruistic enterprise, which must pay its own way. Since the greater part of the 
ships of the world are under a foreign flag, they will pay the tolls, and if we are 
to start to develop our merchant marine, we must start somewhere. It is a great 
problem. Other nations are not going to give it to us easily. There is no brotherly 
love in connection with the matter. We must go for it and fight for it. Unless 
we take drastic measures to carry freight in our own bottoms, we will not be able 
to do it. 
To say that we cannot abrogate treaties is to say that treaties are so binding 
in their general characteristics a nation must always abide by them. In olden 
times most of our industrial conventions were separated from the idea of a treaty 
of peace. In a treaty of peace you do not say that you will be at peace for a 
certain number of years, but forever, unless some cause brings about a war. But 
in a commercial convention, by which certain nations secure certain advantages, 
every one of these conventions have a limit of time during which they are operative. 
When you take into account the commercial character of a convention, it is termin- 
able. Mr. Reid says that we cannot apply discrimination as affecting our 
foreign trade without violating the leading principle of our treaties, but here is 
a case wherein we are bound to prefer our own ships, in our own water, in a great 
enterprise paid for by our own people, and in a territory over which our own flag 
floats. 
If we are to make a declaration of independence in favor of American shipping 
on the ocean, we must begin sometime, because every day is lessening the oppor- 
tunities for doing this, and delay will only ultimately prevent our ever rising to 
the occasion. In other words, hopeless dependence on foreign trade progressively 
