The Cordova daily times., 1921-04-08
RE-ESTABLISH FREE TOLLS
 U.S VESSELS
BY COL. WINFIELD JONES

American vessels to use the Panama
 canal free of tolls is re,established.
 This right was inherent in the 1 United States, which built the canal
 with the money of the people of this
 country, on land, the canal zone,
 which is an integral part of the re-
 public. The last administration sur
 rendered this right for free tolls for
 American ships at the behest of Great
 Britain, why, no one to this day
 knows unless 1t be former President
 Wilson. Such surrender can be
 viewed in no other light, by common
 sense, than an abandonment of an in-
 disputable American right by an
 American president. It is so re-
 garded today by practically every
 person who takes the trouble to
 look up the history of the canal and
 the devious and mysterious policy
 that led MT. Wilson to give up this
 right.
 I Of all the wretched mistakes of
 the Wilson administration this was
 the greatest. The continuous Mexi-
 can fiasco and the wiggling and wob-
 bling foreign policy was as nothing
 compared to the canal rights surren-
 der, for such surrender held back
 and still holds back the development
 of American ocean commerce, with the result that the British and other foreign ocean nations here profited thereby.
 If there was ever a "secret ar
 engagement secretly arrived at" the
 surrender of free tolls for American vessels was one. The Wilson ad-
 ministration at the time the surren- 1 der of this American right was made asserted that MT. Wilson would be greatly embarrassed" if the conces- sion was not made. This confession was a plain acknowledgement that the surrender did not have to be made for any legal or moral obliga- tiOn of this country, but was in con summation of a "secret bargain" whose nature could not be revealed to the people and not even to the senate It was not revealed and re- mains to this day one of the mysteries of the last administration. At the time it occurred congress in both house and senate had a Democratic majority and was under the thumb"
 of the then president At that time in Washington congress was derisive ly termed "Wilson's rubber stamp"
 At any rate the free tolls right was ignonimously and secretly surren- dered, though there was not a single paragraph in the Hay Pauncefote treaty that required any such con cession to foreign nations. Not onl, was national self-respect lost bu' expansion of the American merchant
 marine was greatly hampered.
 The Hay-Pauncefote treaty does not require the United States to pay tolls on it's own merchant ships passing l through the canal. Therefore it is the plain duty of President Harding and congress to speedily re-establish this right which the previous administra- tion bartered away for something that
 has not yet been discovered or ex- plained. MT. Harding is not a be- liever in such secret arrangements, like that which lost the free tolls right for our ships. It is not MT Harding's duty to enter into any secret agreement with any foreign government concerning not only free tolls but any and all other American
 rights. MT. Harding has no such
 mandate and we may be sure he will never construe any existing treaty or agree to any future treaty that will sacrifice a single American right national or international.
 If the canal, with free tolls for American ships, cannot pay expenses, then the deficit should be made up by congressional appropriations, the same as the postal or any other de- partmental annual shortage
 MT. Harding has declared for a big navy and a great merchant ma rine. It is true the canal has doubled the offensive power of the American navy, as the whole uavy can be concentrated, thanks to the canal, in either Atlantic or Pacific on short notice, instead of having to sail around the Horn as before the canal was completed. It is true that ships of the navy do not pay tolls, but American merchant ships do, this re- striction must be removed if Ameri- can overseas commerce is to grow and prosper, and if an American merchant marine is to secure it's share of the ocean carrying trade of the world