the United States, with power to police the canal, and the clause of the first draft forbidding fortifications was omitted.[183] This convention removed the principal diplomatic obstacles which stood in the way of constructing a canal through the isthmus. For several years the United States had been investigating the cost of constructing a canal through Nicaragua, that route being the one which had always been considered most feasible by the great majority of American engineers. Two commissions, one in 1895 and another in 1897, had reported favorably on the practicability of that route. A third commission, headed by Admiral John G. Walker, was appointed under act of March 3, 1899, which authorized an expenditure of $1,000,000 for the purpose of making a thorough investigation of all available routes. While the Walker commission was carrying on investigations in Nicaragua, at Panama, and along the Atrato river, the various financial interests concerned in the choice of routes were actively at work in Washington, each trying to influence Congress in favor of its particular project. The New Panama Canal Company had secured, at the time of the reorganization, an extension of its concession to October, 1904, and subsequently another concession to October, 1910, but the validity of the latter arrangement was in doubt. The company could not raise the necessary funds to continue the work at Panama and was therefore threatened with the forfeiture of its franchise and property. It concluded, therefore, that its only hope lay in transferring its concession and property to the American government. With this end in view, an active lobby was maintained at Washington for the purpose of influencing public opinion in favor of the Panama route. But the Panama Company had a powerful rival in the Maritime Canal Company, which held a charter from Congress and had secured a concession from Nicaragua. This company had started work at Greytown in 1890, but having been forced from lack of funds to stop work in 1893, was now urging Congress to make its enterprise a national one. It found a ready champion in Senator Morgan of Alabama, who had for years taken a lively interest in the canal question and who had strong convictions as to the superiority of the Nicaragua route. In 1900 Nicaragua declared the concession of the Maritime Canal Company null and void, and granted a new concession to a group of New York capitalists known as the Grace-Eyre-Cragin Syndicate. The Maritime Canal Company, however, refused to abandon its claims, and a contest between the two concerns was carried to the lobbies of Congress. The opposition of the transcontinental railroads to a canal at either point brought into play another set of powerful interests, usually arrayed against the plan which appeared for the time being most likely to succeed.[184]