ng the ocean mail service efficient. One quarter of those profits
would establish all these lines which I have described between the
United States and South and Central America, and give us, besides a good
mail service, enlarged markets for the producers and merchants of the
United States who pay the postage from which the profits come.[12]

In his last message to Congress, President Roosevelt said:

To the spread of our trade in peace and the defense of our
flag in war a great and prosperous merchant marine is
indispensable. We should have ships of our own and seamen of
our own to convey our goods to neutral markets, and in case
of need to reenforce our battle line. It cannot but be a
source of regret and uneasiness to us that the lines of
communication with our sister republics of South America
should be chiefly under foreign control. It is not a good
thing that American merchants and manufacturers should have
to send their goods and letters to South America via Europe
if they wish security and dispatch. Even on the Pacific,
where our ships have held their own better than on the
Atlantic, our merchant flag is now threatened through the
liberal aid bestowed by other governments on their own steam
lines. I ask your earnest consideration of the report with
which the Merchant Marine Commission has followed its long
and careful inquiry.

The bill now pending in the House is a bill framed upon the report of
that Merchant Marine Commission. The question whether it shall become a
law depends upon your Representatives in the House. You have the
judgment of the Postmaster-General, you have the judgment of the
Senate, you have the judgment of the President; if you agree with these
judgments and wish the bill which embodies them to become a law, say so
to your Representatives. Say it to them individually and directly, for
it is your right to advise them and it will be their pleasure to hear
from you what legislation the interests of their constituents demand.

The great body of Congressmen are always sincerely desirous to meet the
just wishes of their constituents and to do what is for the public
interest; but in this great country they are continually assailed by
innumerable expressions of private opinion and by innumerable demands
for the expenditure of public money; they come to discriminate very
clearly between private op