fic Mail Steamship Company came forward with an offer to
add another monthly mail-steamship service to Japan and China, for an
additional subsidy of a half million dollars a year. At the same session
a project to establish a subsidized line to Australia was introduced;
another, for a subsidized line from New Orleans to Cuba. These failed,
while the scheme of the Pacific Mail won. A bill authorizing such
contract was enacted June 1, that year, after prolonged and warm
debates, and by close votes in House and Senate. Two years afterwards it
was discovered that bribery had been employed in securing the passage of
that act; the charge being that a million dollars had been spent by a
corrupt lobby in pushing the bill through.[HG] Upon these disclosures,
and because the company had failed to fulfil its conditions, Congress,
by act of March 3, 1875, abrogated the contract.[HH] In 1877 the first
contract with the Pacific Mail for the Japan and China service, expired.
During its ten years' term the company had received from the Government
a total of $4,583,333.33.[HI]

With the Pacific Mail exposure the word subsidy became unsavory to the
public taste, and for some years after no subsidy measure, however
carefully guarded or respectably backed, could find favor in Congress. A
second project for subsidizing a new line to Brazil, proposed by John
Roach, the noted American shipbuilder, in 1879, was among those
ventured, only to fail.

* * * * *

A decade later, in 1889, when conditions seemed to be growing more
propitious, the subject was revived with vigor by the introduction of a
navigation subsidy bill proposed by the American Shipping League.[HJ]
From this evolved in 1890 a tonnage bounty bill reported in the House by
Representative James M. Farquhar of New York.[HK] The final outcome,
indirectly, of these moves was the reestablishment of the postal subsidy
system, abandoned in 1858, in the enactment March 3, 1891, of what is
known as the Postal Aid Law.

This one ship-subsidy law now on the statutes was in its original draft
one of two proposed measures, termed respectively the Mail Ship Bill and
the Cargo Ship Bill, both reported in the Senate by Senator William P.
Frye of Maine. The Cargo Bill provided for navigation bounties to
sailing-ships and steamers. The objects of these measures, as stated by
the promoters, were "(1) to secure regular and quicker service to
countries now reached; (2)