He was now a person whose return from Europe, with plans for river improvement, and news about a fresh engineering scheme, was an item in the small as well as the large newspapers. For, since the Jetties were finished, he had a new scheme,--a decidedly new one it seemed to most people,--though, as formerly, he made no pretense of having originated the idea. Instead of resting content, now that he was almost sixty,--rich, and honored, and frail,--instead of resting content on his laurels of the gunboats, the Bridge, the Jetties, he was as active as ever, with the hope of opening more roads to commerce and prosperity. The publication of the proceedings of De Lesseps's Interoceanic Canal Congress in 1879 gave Eads an opportunity to propose, in a letter to the New York "Tribune," his own project for spanning the isthmus. The Tehuantepec route from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific would be, in the general lines of travel, about 2000 miles shorter than the Panama route, or 1500 miles shorter than the Nicaragua. And it was at Tehuantepec that Eads proposed building, not a canal, but a ship-railway. The proposition was astounding. It certainly suggested very picturesque visions of transportation; but at first sight it did not sound very practicable. However, Eads held that it presented six great and purely practical advantages: First, it could be built for much less than the cost of a canal. Secondly, it could be built in one quarter of the time. Thirdly, it could, with absolute safety, transport ships more rapidly. Fourthly, its actual cost could be more accurately foretold. Fifthly, the expense of maintaining it would be less than for a canal. Sixthly, its capacity could be easily increased to meet future requirements. In 1880 he appeared before a committee of the House, and in reply to De Lesseps, who was advocating the Panama Canal, he stated his plan for the ship-railway. A few months later he went to Mexico, where the government gave him, besides a very valuable concession for building the ship-railway, its cordial assistance in his surveys. It was at this time that Mexico requested his aid in improving its two harbors, and when he returned home, sent him in the Mexican man-of-war, the Independencia. The next year he proposed to Congress to build the ship-railway at his own risk, and to give the United States special privileges, which had been arranged for in his Mexican charter, provided the government would, as he proved the practicability of his plan by actual construction and operation, guarantee part of the ship-railway's dividends. Although this arrangement would have laid as little risk on the government as the jetty arrangement had, it was not accepted.