In response Congress by act of April 28, 1904, created the Merchant Marine Commission with power to make the broadest kind of an inquiry. This body was composed of five Senators and five Representatives, two of the Senators and two of the Representatives members of the minority party. Senator Jacob H. Gallinger of New Hampshire was chairman. Eight months between the adjournment and reassembling of Congress was devoted to its appointed task. All the larger ports of the country were visited, its itinerary embracing the principal cities on the North Atlantic seaboard, on the Great Lakes, on the Pacific coast, and on the southern coast and Gulf of Mexico. Hearings were given in all these places to hundreds of citizens: commercial bodies, shipbuilders, shipowners, shipping merchants, merchants in general trade, manufacturers, bankers, lawyers, editors, doctrinaires. So wide indeed was the investigation, and so liberal the "open door" rule, admitting for consideration any "intelligent suggestion offered in good faith," that "alien agents" of foreign steamships were heard with the rest.[HR] While differences of opinion as to methods and policies naturally were encountered, the commission declared that it found public sentiment, as this was sounded throughout the United States, "practically unanimous not in merely desiring, but in demanding an American ocean fleet, built, owned, officered, and so far as may be, manned by our own people." This sentiment was "just as earnest on the Great Lakes ... as on either ocean."[HR] The results of the investigation were embodied in an elaborate report, comprising majority and minority reports of the commission, and the mass of testimony taken at the hearings: the whole filling three large pamphlet volumes, in all of nearly two thousand pages.[HS] The majority reported a bill. This was presented as merely an extension of the principles of the Postal Aid Act of 1891, involving "no new departure from the established practice of the Government." Its ocean mail sections were intended "simply to strengthen the existing act on lines where it has happened to prove inadequate." The subsidies which it granted were termed, inoffensively, "subventions," and its promoters protested that these "subventions" were "not in any opprobrious sense a subsidy or bounty." They were "not bounties outright, or mere commercial subsidies such as many of our contemporaries give." They were "granted frankly in compensation for public services rendered and to be rendered."[HT]