The "American idea" is that individuals as well as corporations, poor men as well as rich ones, small towns as well as large ones, one maritime State as well as another, should be encouraged to follow the sea. The old woman who thanked God, upon her first sight of the sea, that at last she had seen something there was enough of, lived before subsidies were invented and the sea shrank to be too small for all the people. The contracts made with the International Company bind the government to pay it $4.00 a mile for fifty-two trips a year (3162 miles each) between New York and Southampton for the ten years (1895-1905)--$657,696 a year, and $6,576,960 for the ten years; and the same rate a mile for the same number of trips a year (of 3350 miles each) between New York and Antwerp for ten years--$696,800 a year, and $6,968,000 for the ten years. This makes an income from the mails alone of $1,354,496 a year on the not-to-exceed $10,000,000 which the company will have invested. At the end of the ten years it will have received from these government contracts alone its whole investment, and more than one-third in addition. The American taxpayer will receive for his share the profit and pleasure of being forbidden to send his letters to Europe by faster and cheaper boats, when these appear, as they have already begun to do. The trial trips of new steamers of other lines show them to be faster than the vessels we have bound ourselves to. "The American principle" used to be to send all mails by the fastest ships. Now, to develop the "American merchant marine," we relieve it from all necessity of competing in speed, or anything else, with the foreign marine.