the Chamber of Commerce figures, from a rule adopted long ago; include the gold exportations and importations also. So you see that this old Port of New York is not in such bad shape after all. [Applause.]

Lately much has been said because we did not have docks long enough for the long ships. Nor has New Jersey long enough docks for the Hamburg-American ships, so the Hamburg-American people came over here, and I had a talk with MR. BALLIN, the head of that great concern, before he went back to Europe the other day. He wants to come over here, and we want to basten this matter as much as possible to bring him over here with all his ships, if we can. We did think that a temporary permit would be granted without question, but the Secretary of War has seen fit to deny it, and scolded a little over it. If he does not look out, MR. ROOT, we will have a new Secretary of War after the fourth of March. You tell him that when you go back to Washington. [Laughter.] One fact is certain that if we are now ready to enter upon the building of adequate docks, the temporary permit will be granted all right who ever is Secretary of War until the dock is built. What I may call force of circumstances in this world is greater than I had almost said- any Secretary of War [laughter] by which I mean of course in times of peace. [Laughter.]

Now I talked with MR. BALLIN about the South Brooklyn docks. MR. SMITH has been so good as to have a map printed of the harbor, which has been given to us here to-night, and which is worth taking to your homes. Seldom at dinners to which I go do they ever give us anything worth taking home. [Laughter.] Some of them gave you a headache. [Laughter.] MR. BALLIN is probably about to lease one of these Brooklyn docks. The longest passenger dock we have over here in Manhattan is 825 feet. Now, you live in New York, but I am afraid a good many of you do not know that Brooklyn is a part of New York. [Laughter.] Let me tell you that over in Brooklyn they have four piers, as fine piers as there are in the Port of New York, that are 1,600 feet long. Do you know that? [Laughter.] You have not got that in Manhattan. There was some suggestion that these long ships go to these long piers. I talked with MR. BALLIN about that, but his wish was only to hire the City's pier over there, for the City only owns one of those four which I have mentioned. The only purpose is to hire it for freight purposes. We have examined into every feature. There is a good channel there; the average depth of water is 37 feet, and as to the depths of ships, as I understand it, the largest is only from 36 to 38 feet, so that very little dredging there would make that channel capable of accomnodating the largest ships that come over. Of course I speak of the Bay Ridge Channel.

Then I conversed, not being entirely satisfied, with experts on other subject. Some people tried to convince me that it is not practicable to land these large vessels there in all weather. The ice do collect there in the winter; the northwest wind is a great

obstacle at times. So MR. SMITH did me a great kindness in bringing to me two men that could tell me more on that subject than any other two men, those two men being the chairman of the New York Board of Pilots, and the Chairman of the New Jersey Board of Pilots and they did rather convince me of the difficulties which I have mentioned being real. With regard to freight vessels the difficulties amounted to very little. More than that Brooklyn has been, from the beginning, the great terminal and storehouse for freight. Many in this room know that. Some of the great warehouses there now, are out of use because they haven't been kept up with their docks with the times. And it is natural for the freight to converge there, and on the whole the city will now probably adhere to the policy of making the Brooklyn docks principally for freight purposes, as that seems to be their natural use.

When we come over to Manhattan our eye rests, of course, immediately upon the Chelsea Docks, by which I mean these grand docks, with their lower and upper stories, where the great passenger ships now land on the Hudson. I have crossed the Atlantic myself I think twentysix times. I have made a particular examination three times of the docks of Liverpool long before ever I dreamed of being, mayor, and once a particular and close examination of the docks of London; and the docks on the continent of Europe I have looked at to some extent also, but not so closely; and I say that these Chelsea docks are not rivalled anywhere in Europe, not only for the convenience of ships entering and going out, but for the convenience of passengers and freight landed there. Right next to the Chelsea Docks to the south is room to build two half piers but only 900 feet long. But in the report of MR. SMITH and his associates to the Governor he pointed out this stretch of water from Forty-fourth Street-I might more properly say, may be, from Forty-second Street, up to Fifty-ninth Street, where there is ample room, (especially with the arrangement which we are going to make with the New York Central Railroad Company) to build a series of docks 1200 or even 1300 feet long, and may be two or three of them 1400 feet long, so that that is an ample provision for your lifetime and for the lifetime of those whom you will leave after you. [Applause.]

Then further up the river at Seventy-second Street, not yet mapped, is another spacious place which MR. SMITH and I have concluded to leave to your ancestors to develop [laughter] and I wouldn't wonder if the city authorities agreed with MR. SMITH. Whether they will always agree with me or not I don't know. I get along by agreeing with them. I have gone all my life on the principle that there is no dividend to be gotten out of quarrels. [Laughter.]

Now those words of one syllable which I promised you, and which I hope will be acceptable to MR. HEARST and the MESSRS. PULITZER, explain the situation here. [Laughter.] We are now striving to meet the growth of these ships, and we have got things to where we are ready to lay out a plan. As you men know, a plan is the main thing. Once a plan is laid out the building and the work goes on, no

matter who may come or may go politically. Once the engineers and the practical men get hold of the plan the thing goes, no matter who comes or who goes. Now, that is what we are striving to do, and in a short time we can have at least one pier ready.

But some of you, I dare say, are thinking of the finances. Well, let me say that some people think that it is all very easy, that everything should have been decided over night, or even in a dream. I wish I could be aided by dreams the way the ancients were, it would save me a lot of trouble [laughter] but I have always, ever since I was up in Oneida County where Roor and I grew up with the potatoes and the corn, had to think out everything I did, and I guess Roor has had to do the same; he looks like it; [laughter.] but flippant people think it can be done just as easy as you would eat a cookie. Why, in great things you have got to meet all sorts of opposition. No sooner did we file the preliminary report the other day with regard to the South. Brooklyn water front than these gentlemen, to whom I have alluded, forthwith came out in their newspapers with glaring headlines “A great job. The City to be sold out again." Well, the City hasn't been sold yet, and there isn't much chance of it in the immediate future. I think you all feel pretty safe about that. If I didn't believe so, I wouldn't like to talk to you at all. I think you believe that we are doing the best we can, even though it isn't much. [Applause.]

Be

The finances is the next subject to consider. The great Liverpool docks have $190,000,000 invested in them. The City of Liverpool has nothing to do with them. The Mersey Dock Board, to give the short title to it, builds and runs the docks and finances them, sells the bonds, and puts the rates of dockage down to the lowest figures that will pay the interest and sinking fund on the bonds. Some people here are all the time crying out, to "sock it to them," as they say, to make the rates as high as we can. Now, I don't for a moment believe in that. I do not believe in burdening the commerce of this port by any rate larger than is necessary to make our dock bonds self-sustaining. yond that not one dollar. [Loud applause.] Here the dock bonds amount to $103,000,000. I mean the bonds out for the purposes of the Dock Department. But the Dock Department takes in the ferries, which really should be in a separate department. There are also piers built for recreation purposes, and other things that I could enumerate, that have nothing to do with the port or the docks, but are rather local affairs. But when all these are taken out the bonds of that investment stand at $77.000.000 and the net income from the port collections-mind you the net income-in round number is $3.600,000. That sum, if you figure it up, you will find is sufficient to pay the interest and the sinking fund on nearly $74,000,000. So that safely $70,000.000, of these bonds are self sustaining; to wit, the net income pays the interest safely, and the sinking fund on them to pay them off at maturity. We have a constitutional amendment by which we can reckon ont of the city debt limitation of ten per cent. on the valuations of the realty all the bonds invested in things that are business concerns and are self supporting. That was brought about by a

constitutional amendment-which, I think, by the way, originated, MR. CLAFLIN, in your body, a few years ago. It relates to the subways, to the docks and all the self supporting bonds of the city. We have to apply to the Court, however, and show that the net income makes them self supporting. We did that with the subway bonds and forthwith the court released them, and we have that much credit to throw into these new subways. Now, already we have before the Supreme Court an application for the release of the $73,000,000 self sustaining dock bonds, and we feel of course entirely certain that the court will release at least $70,000,000, to be on the safe side, and that $70,000,000, will do all that we want to do on docks for many years to come. Indeed so large a sum is it that in our subway calculations in figuring out how we were going to build, we figured that we would draw $16,000,000, from the Dock Department, although in my speech before the Chamber of Commerce the year that I became Mayor I did assure you that we never would take any of the dock funds for the subway purposes, but we were so short of credit-I see MR. OUTERBRIDGE remembers, and it makes him smile to hear me tell about it, and no man among you has helped us more than MR. OUTERBRIDGE, [applause] we sailed so close to the wind in this subway business that, in order to make the contract which we have to make for operation, we had to draw on every resource of borrowing capacity of the city. I even had to add a billion dollars to the valuations of the realty of the city. You intelligent men know that I was not able to talk subway with MR. SHONTS or with anybody else until I did that, and he knew perfectly well that we could not build any subways, that we did not have the credit; but I went to the Board of Tax Commissioners and said that we have got to equalize the values throughout the city, finding them very low here and rather high there, and in place of scaling them down to the valleys we would lift the valleys up to the summits and have a uniform valuation throughout the city. The result was one billion of dollars, and when everything was cut off it resulted in $85,000,000 of borrowing credit to the city which enabled us the next day to say to these financiers that the city had $85,000,000, to go to work with, and we didn't ask much odds of them anyhow. [Applause.] Then they put in half and we put in half. And we will have a little of our $85,000,000 left.

Now, I must not talk you to death. I have said all that I think I should say about the matter. There is much of minutiae about it, and negotiations; but I have tried to give you the salient facts and figures concerning this great port of which you are, and should be, justly proud. [Loud applause.]

PRESIDENT CLAFLIN.-Our next toast is "A Government of Laws, not of Men." It will be responded to by a distinguished jurist who clarifies and illumines every subject he discusses, the Honorable JAMES M. BECK. [Applause.]

ADDRESS BY THE HONORABLE JAMES M. BECK.

MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN OF THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE. I fear that nearly every subject has been "clarified and illumined" by the preceding speakers. In fact, so much has been said upon so many topics, and the evening is so well advanced, that I feel very much as did a dentist who was appointed royal dentist to a certain monarch only to learn that His Majesty had just lost his last tooth. When I received the invitation of the Chamber of Commerce to speak on this occasion, I could only regard it, having due regard for the important position which the Chamber has always occupied in this community, as being almost the equivalent, in a democratic community, to a royal command.

I, like all this audience, was most deeply impressed by the speech of the distinguished Senator from New York. Eliminating for the moment his most timely and interesting reference to the moral duty of this country in regard to the Panama Canal, I agree with Senator ROOT in his statement that, in any form of government, it is necessary to its effective and practical workings that there should be a spirit both of liberty and of justice and of self restraint on the part of the people. I cordially assent to that which he said with his usual felicity of diction, and I venture to add, that it is not only necessary that there should be, in any free people, a spirit of liberty, but that it is absolutely essential that that spirit of liberty should have its practical expression in a working government that will have both stability and justice in its practical operation. [Applause.]

There has been, so far as I know, no public reference in the editorials to which the Mayor has referred, or in any public speech in recent months, to the fact that this is the one hundred and twenty-fifth year of the Constitution of the United States. One hundred and twentyfive years ago, some forty gentlemen with powdered queues and knee breeches met in the assembly room of Independence Hall, and there tried to accomplish the stupendous task, in a time of peace, of putting all of the comprehensive powers of government in to one compact written statement. They fulfilled this purpose as no other generation had, and they had that spirit of liberty, to which Senator Roor has referred, as no other generation ever had. They had not been unfamiliar with a written constitution, because they had already framed one that had signally failed. They lived in a time of political philosophy in which much was said about the rights of men, and in which every nation in civilization was inspired as perhaps no preceding generation had been, with all the noble ideals to which reference has been made. And vet, although a constitution had been formed before, and although EDMUND BURKE, not long before this Constitution was framed, contemptuously referred to "constitution-mongers with their nests of pigeonholes, crammed full with constitutions ticketed, assorted and ready made," for the first time in history that Convention formed and laid down a constitution carrying out the best philosophic ideals