There is another matter of which I must make special mention, if I am to discharge my conscience, lest it should escape your attention.  It may seem a very small thing.  It affects only a single item of appropriation.  But many human lives and many great enterprises hang upon it.  It is the matter of making adequate provision for the survey and charting of our coasts.  It is immediately pressing and exigent in connection with the immense coast line of Alaska, a coast line greater than that of the United States themselves, though it is also very important indeed with regard to the older coasts of the continent.  We cannot use our great Alaskan domain, ships will not ply thither, if those coasts and their many hidden dangers are not thoroughly surveyed and charted.  The work is incomplete at almost every point.  Ships and lives have been lost in threading what were supposed to be well-known main channels.  We have not provided adequate vessels or adequate machinery for the survey and charting.  We have used old vessels that were not big enough or strong enough and which were so nearly unseaworthy that our inspectors would not have allowed private owners to send them to sea.  This is a matter which, as I have said, seems small, but is in reality very great.  Its importance has only to be looked into to be appreciated.

Before I close may I say a few words upon two topics, much discussed out of doors, upon which it is highly important that our judgments should be clear, definite, and steadfast?

One of these is economy in government expenditures.  The duty of economy is not debatable.  It is manifest and imperative.  In the appropriations we pass we are spending the money of the great people whose servants we are,—­not our own.  We are trustees and responsible stewards in the spending.  The only thing debatable and upon which we should be careful to make our thought and purpose clear is the kind of economy demanded of us.  I assert with the greatest confidence that the people of the United States are not jealous of the amount their Government costs if they are sure that they get what they need and desire for the outlay, that the money is being spent for objects of which they approve, and that it is being applied with good business sense and management.

Governments grow, piecemeal, both in their tasks and in the means by which those tasks are to be performed, and very few Governments are organized, I venture to say, as wise and experienced business men would organize them if they had a clean sheet of paper to write upon.  Certainly the Government of the United States is not.  I think that it is generally agreed that there should be a systematic reorganization and reassembling of its parts so as to secure greater efficiency and effect considerable savings in expense.  But the amount of money saved in that way would, I believe, though no doubt considerable in itself, running, it may be, into the millions, be relatively small,—­small,