Congress was devoted to its appointed task.  All the larger ports of the country were visited, its itinerary embracing the principal cities on the North Atlantic seaboard, on the Great Lakes, on the Pacific coast, and on the southern 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 rendered."[HT]

The proposed measure, however, was more than an extension of the act of 1891.  Its scope was indicated by its title:  “To promote the national defence, to create a force of naval volunteers, to establish American ocean mail lines to foreign markets, to promote commerce, and to provide revenue from tonnage.”  The subsidies offered comprised mail subventions to steamships; subventions to general cargo carriers and deep-sea fishing-ships, both steam and sail; and retainers to officers and men of American merchant ships and deep-sea fishing vessels enrolling as naval volunteers.  It opened with provisions for the establishment of a naval reserve.