The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1870-06-01
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 1, 1870.
NEW PACIFIC CABLE PROJECT.

The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations
yesterday reported favorably upon Cyrus w.
Fields bill to lay Pacific cable, which con-
tains the extraordinary provision that the
Government of the United States shall not
only detail vessels to make surveys and sound
ings and render other assistance to the work,
but that it shall contribute five hundred
thousand dollars per annum for twenty years
to proposed new cable company, receiving
nothing in exchange for this appropriation
but the privilege of transmitting free Govern
ment messages, provided they do not exceed
in value the $500, 900 of subsidy! A number
of wealthy men, nearly all of whom are citi-
zens OF New York, are named as the corpo-
rators of this company. These gentlemen,
with such associates as they may select will
be the owners of the proposed cable, if it is
ever constructed. The cost of the whole un-
dertaking will scarcely amount to one-half
the sum they modestly ask from the Govern
ment; and if the line proves to be sufficiently
useful to private interests to obtain from
them sufficient revenue to defray its current
expenditure, the stockholders would find
themselves, at the end of twenty years, in
the enviable position of having received from
an admiring nation not only the cable free of
expense, but a sum equal to its cost, in addi-
ton, bestowed as a bonus for the privilege
of making this magnificent present If the
country is likely to require $500,000 per
annum of cable telegraphy on the
Pacific, it had far better build the
line outright, and own and control
it, than adopt this proposed scheme for en-
riching the few at the expense of the many.
Ocean telegraphs are proper objects of such
incidental national aid as can be rendered by
official negotiations or by Government ves-
Bels which are not otherwise employed, but
more proftably employed by Congress in
purchasing or building telegraphic lines within
the country than in bestowing proprietary
rights in the Pacific Ocean upon few
favorites If Cyrus w. Fields new cable bill
receives the sanction of the national authori-
ties, in its present shape, the Senate and
House of Representatives should next
vote away the Capitol and the
public grounds in Washington to private
corporation, on a pretext that it could MAJ
age them more judiciously than the pre-
oouO oWhoio, ulli StO1 hoiOo w SiNO q iui 80
annual rent for the future use of what is now
national property. In the infancy of ocean
telegraphy, when the risks to be encountered
were infinitely greater than at present, and
when many difficulties remained to be mas
tered, Mr.. Field might have asked with much
better grace than at present for Government
aid. The nation helped, not unwisely, to
establish the first practicable land telegraph,
and there would have been no great impro-
priety in assisting, by small direct appropria-
tion, the first efforts to lay cable across
the Atlantic But capitalists can now calcu-
late the cost and the chances of profit in
these enterprises, and governing their actions
by the great controlling motive of modern
times, they will cable the Pacific as soon as
they are satisfied that it will prove sufficiently
useful to ''pay." Taxpayers will infinitely
prefer that those who hold the purse-strings
will wait for this propitious moment, instead
of imposing on them an unnecessary new
burden.