our checks; but we want every bolt in that ship forged in American foundries from metal dug out of American soil.  We want every plank in her hull shaped from American trees, every sail of her woven by American looms, every man of her born of American parents, and we want it this way because we believe in American manufactures, because we believe in American shipbuilding, because we believe in American sailmakers, and because we believe in the intelligence and pluck and endurance and courage of the American sailor.

“Well,” Campbell continued, changing his position and speaking in a quieter voice, “we did not say much to anybody, and, in fact, we never really planned any expedition at all.  We merely talked about its practical nature and the desirability of having it distinctively American.  This was all last summer.  What we wanted to do was to make the scheme a popular one.  It would not be hard to raise a hundred thousand dollars from among a dozen or so men whom we both know, and we found that we could count upon the financial support of Mr. Garlock’s society.  That was all very well, but we wanted the people to back this enterprise.  We would rather get a thousand five-dollar subscriptions than five of a thousand dollars each.  When our ship went out we wanted her commander to feel, not that there were merely a few millionaires, who had paid for his equipment and his vessel, behind him, but that he had seventy millions of people, a whole nation, at his back.

“So Tremlidge went to work and telegraphed instructions to the Washington correspondents of his paper to sound quietly the temper of as many Congressmen as possible in the matter of making an appropriation toward such an expedition.  It was not so much the money we wanted as the sanction of the United States.  Anything that has to do with the Navy is popular just at present.  We had got a Congressman to introduce and father an appropriation bill, and we could count upon the support of enough members of both houses to put it through.  We wanted Congress to appropriate twenty thousand dollars.  We hoped to raise another ten thousand dollars by popular subscription.  Mr. Garlock could assure us two thousand dollars; Tremlidge would contribute twenty thousand dollars in the name of the Times, and I pledged myself to ten thousand dollars, and promised to build the ship’s engines and fittings.  We kept our intentions to ourselves, as Tremlidge did not want the other papers to get hold of the story before the Times printed it.  But we continued to lay our wires at Washington.  Everything was going as smooth as oil; we seemed sure of the success of our appropriation bill, and it was even to be introduced next week, when the news came of the collapse of the English expedition—­the Duane-Parsons affair.