syndicate is going to worry you some, old man, before you are through."

Foster got to his feet. "See here, Hollis, be fair. Look at it once from
the other side. The Morgansteins have done more for Alaska than they will
ever be given credit for. Capital is the one key to open that big, new,
mountain-locked country, and the Government is treating it like a
boa-constrictor to be throttled and stamped out. Millions went into the
development of the El Dorado, yet they still have to ship the ore
thousands of miles to a smelter, with coal,--the best kind, inexhaustible
fields of it,--at our door. And go back to McFarlane. He put one hundred
and fifty thousand into the Chugach Railway to bring out the coal he had
mined, but he can't touch it; it's all tied up in red tape; the road is
rotting away. He is getting to be an old man, but I saw him doing day
labor on the Seattle streets to-day. Then there's the Copper River
Northwestern. That company built a railroad where every engineer but one,
who saw the conditions, said it could not be done. You yourself have
called it the most wonderful piece of construction on record. You know how
that big bridge was built in winter--the only time when the bergs stopped
chipping off the face of the glacier long enough to set the piers; you
know how Haney worked his men, racing against the spring thaw--he's paying
for it with his life, now, down in California. In dollars that bridge
alone cost a million and a half. Yet, with this road finished through the
coast mountains, they've had to suspend operation because they can't burn
their own coal. They've got to change their locomotives to oil burners.
And all this is just because the President delays to annul a temporary
restriction the previous executive neglected to remove. We have waited; we
have imported from British Columbia, from Japan; shipped in Pennsylvania,
laid down at Prince William Sound at fifteen dollars a ton, when our own
coal could be mined for two and a quarter and delivered here in Seattle
for five."