coast and Gulf of Mexico. Hearings were given in all these places to
hundreds of citizens: commercial bodies, shipbuilders, shipowners,
shipping merchants, merchants in general trade, manufacturers, bankers,
lawyers, editors, doctrinaires. So wide indeed was the investigation,
and so liberal the "open door" rule, admitting for consideration any
"intelligent suggestion offered in good faith," that "alien agents" of
foreign steamships were heard with the rest.[HR] While differences of
opinion as to methods and policies naturally were encountered, the
commission declared that it found public sentiment, as this was sounded
throughout the United States, "practically unanimous not in merely
desiring, but in demanding an American ocean fleet, built, owned,
officered, and so far as may be, manned by our own people." This
sentiment was "just as earnest on the Great Lakes ... as on either
ocean."[HR]

The results of the investigation were embodied in an elaborate report,
comprising majority and minority reports of the commission, and the mass
of testimony taken at the hearings: the whole filling three large
pamphlet volumes, in all of nearly two thousand pages.[HS]

The majority reported a bill. This was presented as merely an extension
of the principles of the Postal Aid Act of 1891, involving "no new
departure from the established practice of the Government." Its ocean
mail sections were intended "simply to strengthen the existing act on
lines where it has happened to prove inadequate." The subsidies which it
granted were termed, inoffensively, "subventions," and its promoters
protested that these "subventions" were "not in any opprobrious sense a
subsidy or bounty." They were "not bounties outright, or mere commercial
subsidies such as many of our contemporaries give." They were "granted
frankly in compensation for public services rendered and to be