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Doc. No. 75. 



the sentiments with which I have been impressed by the contemplation of 

 her great calamities. He who loves the land which gave him birthj must 

 necessarily desne to transplant into it whatever he sees of good and great 

 in other countries^ if it be deemed useful to her institutions. This desire 

 cannot be felt, and much less appreciated, by those who, never having 

 ventured beyond the pale of their domestic hearths, have seen nothing to 

 induce them to draw comparisons ; and being destitute of that knowledge 

 which can only be acquired by actual observation, arrive at the conclusion 

 that there is nothing worth knowing, doing, or thinking about in the 

 world, except what they themselves know, do, or think. 



Having pointed out the benefits which must result from such an un- 

 dertaking as the Nicaragua canal, and made use of certain data in order 

 to form a comparative estimate of the costs of the work, it behooves us 

 now to think of the means to be adopted for raising the necessary funds. 

 If there were any moneys in our own public treasury, we should not 

 have to travel very far to settle the matter ; but we find ourselves pre- 

 cisely in the same position of extreme poverty in which the State of New 

 York was when the great Clinton, in his anxiety to extricate her from 

 the difficulties by which she was surrounded, advocated with so much 

 zeal the construction of the Erie canal. What has been accomplished by 

 one government can he achieved by another^ U7ider similar circumstances, 

 and by the application of similar means. This is so incontrovertibly true, 

 that it were almost an insult to the understanding and judgment of the 

 reader to adduce proofs in support of the assertion. Arguing from 

 this fact, therefore, I maintain, that inasmuch as the government of Cen- 

 tral America finds itself in precisely the same circumstances as those 

 which embarrassed the State of New York at the period alluded to, we 

 should, in order to carry out our undertaking, adopt the same means as 

 were resorted to with so much success by the projectors of the Erie canal, 

 viz : to borrow the funds necessary to defray the expenses of the canal. 

 This alternative has been adopted with the most beneficial results by 

 three different governments in the construction of canals. As the plan is 

 recommended by a series of experiments which have been crowned with 

 brilliant success, prudence suggests its adoption in preference to all others. 

 We know well enough, much to the injury of our credit and our interest, 

 what was the upshot of the contract entered into by our government with 

 the individual Beneski, the agent of Aaron Palmer, a broker of New York, 

 and how this man, who in his own country had not credit enough to 

 get a hundred-dollar note discounted, was enabled to compete with an 

 English company provided with funds, and finally to outbid them. It 

 is useless now to grieve over past errors, after they have produced all the 

 effects that could result from them. If at that period we had consulted 

 with more earnestness the success of the undertaking, and yielded less to 

 an inordinate anxiety to obtain partial advantages, the canal would, by 

 this time, have been completed, while the income produced by its opera- 

 tions would probably have extingfuished the debt j but it happened other- 

 wise, and at the present moment we actually find ourselves in a very dis- 

 advantageous position — there being no special proposition before the 

 country for a contract to do the work, nor any reasonable hope that such 

 will ever be made, especially since the failure in carrying out those of the 

 King of Holland, whose agents took the initiatory steps as far back as 

 seven years ago. While our own government has remained inactive^ 



