You speak of the eight-hour law. Your criticism, so far as it relates to the Executive, bears upon the signature of the appropriation bill containing the money for expenditure on the Panama Canal, with the proviso that the eight-hour law shall not there apply. If your statement is intended to mean that no opportunity was given for a hearing before me, then the statement is not in accordance with the facts. There was ample opportunity, but not a single request for such a hearing came to me. I received, however, some hundreds of telegrams and letters requesting the veto of the entire appropriation bill because it contained that proviso. Frankly, I found it difficult to believe that you were writing and telegraphing with any kind of knowledge of the conditions in the case. I believe emphatically in the eight-hour law for our own people in our own country. But the conditions of labor, such as we have to work with in the tropics, are so absolutely different that there is no possible analogy between them; and an eight-hour law for the Panama Canal is an absurdity. Every one of you knows that we can not get white labor, can not get labor of the United States, to go down to Panama and work. We are driven to extremities in the effort to get any kind of labor at all. Just at the moment we are working chiefly with negro labor from the West Indies. The usual result in the employment of those men is that Monday and Tuesday they work fairly well, Wednesday and Thursday there is a marked falling off, and by Friday and Saturday not more than a half, sometimes less than a fourth, of the laborers will be at work. The conditions that make the eight-hour law proper here have no possible reference to the conditions that make the eight-hour law entirely improper there. The conditions are so utterly different on the Isthmus, as compared to here, that it is impossible to try to draw conclusions affecting the one from what is true about the other. You hamper me in the effort to get for you what I think you ought to have in connection with the eight-hour law, when you make a request that is indefensible, and to grant which would mean indefinite delay and injury to the work on the Isthmus. As to the violations of the eight-hour law, Mr. Morrison, you give me no specifications. At your earliest convenience please lay before me in detail any complaints you have of violations of the eight-hour law. Where I have power I will see that the law is obeyed. All I ask is that you give me the cases. I will take them up, and if they prove to be sustained by the facts I shall see that the law is enforced.