Mr. HOWE. Then I will stand with him. I hold him to his admission that it can be built more cheaply and will be built more cheaply by the company. This bill authorizes you, whenever you see fit, to take it of the company and pay it the reduced cost which he admits it will be subjected to, with the simple addition of ten%. thereon. The company will build it cheaper than the Government, and when the company has built it at that reduced cost, if the Senator is still hun gering and thirsting after making it a free communication, he has simpl to vote with me and the other friends of t ismeasure to purchase it of these cheap constructers, and we have it, and we have free communication. Mr. President, the Senfrom NewYork reminds us as a reason, he says, not why we should not build the canal, but why we should postpone the passage of this bill until Decem er, that We are overborue by taxation; we are burdened with a great debt. Does the Senator imagine that our debt is particularly larger now in July than it will be in December? Will that argument be any less weighty against the consideration of the bill in December than it is now in July? But what has that suggestion to do with the question at all, either now or in December next 7 Sir, if this mess * are is not one, as I said the other day, to strengthen the people of the U.S., to make them more wealthy, more independeht, more able to stand up under this burden, then we have no business to pass this bill in July, nor shall we have any business to pass it in December. You all concede, when you concede its importance, that it will make the people stronger. lfitwill not, it is notimportant. Vell, sir, if it will make them stronger, for God‘s sake do they not need it more now when they are weaker than they ever were in the world? If you ever mean to nurse and nourish by Government appropriations the people, do they not need it now when they stand confronted by this great debt and are groaning under it? It is as a measure of relief that I ask you to embrace this, of popular relief, and I ask you to embrace it now, not postpone it to another day. The Senfrom NewYork urges that this is a measure antagonistic to that State. If it is antagonistic to the State of NewYork, how will this antagonism be got over between this and December? Will it. be less antagonistic then than now? That may be a reason why we should not pass the bill at all. I subinit to the honorable Senator that it is not, and thatit cannot be a reason why we should postpone its consideration to another session of this body. But is it a reason why we should not pass the bill? How is it to come in antagonism with the State of NewYork? I do not concede the fact that it is so. It may be antagonistic to the interests of the Erie canal; but I understand that the wealth of NewYork lies in the fact that it has the great commercial metropolis of the nation within its boundaries, and that through its gateway the bulk of whatever comes into or goes out of the country must pass, and that it is today and it must be butathorough fare through which the commerce of the nation shall pass to and fro between the sea board and the interior. Whatever enriches the nation, therefore, does and must of necessity enrich the State of NewYork. Why, air, the growth of the West, consequent upon the construction of the Erie canal, is today what makes NewYork what she is. The Senfrom Michigan remarked that the Northwest was indebted to the Erie canal for being what she is. I should not have expressed myself exactly in the same way; I should have said that the nation was indebted to the Erie canal for the existence of the Northwest. But for the Erie canal you would have had no Northwest, or none to speak of.