General DAVIS. I think the contractor ought to have the privilege of getting his labor where he pleases.

The CHAIRMAN. And to fix the hours, too?

General DAVIS. I think he ought to fix his own hours of work. I remember here last winter, indeed in this city, to have made a visit to the bridge that is being built over Rock Creek, and I asked the engineer officer if the eight-hour law bothered him at all. He said no; that that law applied to their own employees that were paid from the Government pay roll, but that the contractor paid no attention to it. I said: "Why, I do not understand that. I do not understand how he has escaped conformity with the law." He said: "The law happens to be so framed that no penalty is provided for its infraction, and the contractor knows that, and he proceeds without any regard to it."

That is in the District of Columbia. I am not vouching for the accuracy of the statement; I only know that I was so told by the engineer in charge.

Senator TALIAFERRO. Do you think, General Davis, that if this work is done by contract the railroad should be turned over to the contractor?

General DAVIS. I do not see how you can help it. I do not see how you can help it.

Senator ANKENY. You would not disturb the commercial business? General DAVIS. Oh, no, sir; no, sir.

Senator ANKENY. The contractor would regulate his own work to the railroad business?

General DAVIS. I think if he was a wise contractor he would take very good care to increase it. He would seek to increase that commercial work if he was a wise man.

Senator TALIAFERRO. It would be your idea, however, that the Government should fix the commercial rates?

General DAVIS. Oh, of course they should fix an upset price which should not be exceeded for the transfer of freight across the Isthmus. Senator TALIAFERRO. So as not to discourage that business?

General DAVIS. So as not to discourage it; no, sir; and then compel him to handle it and put him under penalties for failure to do so. Senator TALIAFERRO. And give him the profits?

General DAVIS. And give him the profits-oh, yes. He ought to have the reward if he incurs the responsibility.

Senator TALIAFERRO. Ordinarily, of course, the Government would be entitled to something for the use of its property.

General DAVIS. Speaking of other engineering works, the jetty at Colombo is one of the greatest pieces of engineering in the world. There is scarcely any exceeding it in importance. You have there a jetty built of solid masonry that has to meet the whole northeast monsoon of the Indian Ocean. I have seen waves dashing against that jetty and rising a hundred feet into the air, with a noise like the booming of a cannon, when they pounded away at that jetty. That was all built by a contracting engineer, Sir John Coode & Co., of England.

The contracting engineers of Europe have had a scope much greater than our contractors in America have had. The subway contract is the only large one that I now recall over here.

Senator TALIAFERRO. General, a good deal has been said about the lands that would be submerged by these lakes-the one at Gatun, under the lock system, and the other at Bohio, is it?

General DAVIS. At Gamboa.

Senator TALIAFERRO. At Gamboa, under the sea-level system. Will you give us your views as to that?

General DAVIS. I stated them to the Board; I gave them all the data I had. I collected it while I was there as governor of the Zone. I cast up the quantity of land that we received by transfer from the French Company. I found the number of parcels and the claimed area, and then I computed the area of the Zone as represented by those very irregular lines. I found out what area of land the Panama Railroad claimed to own. I found out what particular parcels of land were known to be vested in the State at the time we took over the Zone. With that data I made up a tabulation of what looked to me like the way the equities lay-the way they were situated in respect to land ownership; and it is all printed in the report of the Board of Consulting Engineers. That data is all laid down there in the minutes of one of their meetings, I think. I can not recall just at this moment the amount; but, speaking generaly, the claimed ownership of the United States to land received by purchase from the New French Canal Company and land received by virtue of its ownership of the stock of the Panama Railroad-there are those two categories and the lands that it received by cession from the Republic of Panama, together make up, I think, about three-quarters of all the land in the Zone, so far as I could arrive at it by the best calculation I could make, in the making of which I had to do almost all of it as guessing. In other words, the data do not exist for making an accurate schedule of land ownership within the Canal Zone.

Senator ANKENY. Have they no records of deeds or titles, General? General DAVIS. They have a record or deed of this sort: "Beginning at such a place on the bay, and running to a tree on top of a hill."

Senator ANKENY. Not any specific surveys, then?

General DAVIS. Oh, no; nothing specific "thence to the corner of a fence somewhere else." They have no metes and bounds in the sense that the term should convey. But then I found that when we undertook to take possession of any particular piece of land and make use of it in some way, like constructing houses upon it, or something of that kind, I was very often tangled up with claimants of adverse possession, or of some right by prescription, or something of that kind; or else it would be asserted that this man had owned this land for so many generations, and the deeds had been burned up, and he did not know where they were, but it was a common, notorious fact that he owned that land, and that when that other person sold it to the French Company he sold something he did not own. And so the titles to land, and certainly the boundaries to the parcels of land in the Zone, are in a state of utmost confusion.

Senator ANKENY. Digressing a little, would it not be well, if we proceed with that work, to name a date in which all of these titles must be recorded or settled in some way, as we would do in Wyoming, for instance?

General DAVIS. I think the precedent that we followed in California is a good one.

Senator ANKENY. Yes.

General DAVIS. That of having a court of land titles, or whatever you may call it. You know the name better than I.

Senator ANKENY. Yes; I know about that.

General DAVIS. We did the same thing in the Philippines,. There there is a "court of land" something; I do not recall the title.

Senator ANKENY. But ought there not to be some date on which these conflicting titles should be settled in some way, and the ownership at a certain date, for instance, established?

General DAVIS. The proposition of Governor Magoon seems to me an admirable one, and that is to announce by public advertisement. Senator ANKENY. What did you do down there about this thing; anything?

General DAVIS. Oh, I could do nothing except to refer them to the courts and let them litigate, and they never got anywhere in the courts. That is to say, they never can reach any conclusion. Our courts had only been established in the Zone a very short time at the time that I refer to.

Senator ANKENY. Would it be possible for us to say that on such a date as your judgment dictated the titles to these lands must be recorded, or they would belong to our Government after that date? Could we do that?

General DAVIS. Oh, yes, sir; I think so.

Senator MORGAN. We can do any kind of robbery down there we want to. [Laughter.]

Senator ANKENY. That is not robbery, sir.

Senator MORGAN. There is no restraint on us that I know of.
Senator ANKENY. It is simply an adjustment of titles.

General DAVIS. I think there would be no trouble in adjusting those titles, but I think you would have to give public notice that every man can come in and make a " show down" of his pretension to title to this land and provide that this court shall then proceed to adjudicate as between A and B and C, and perhaps one of those will be the Government of the United States.

The CHAIRMAN. They will prove title by their neighbors down there, will they not?

General DAVIS. There will be all kinds of proof; there will be the tallest kind of swearing there.

The CHAIRMAN. Where are we going to swear, General? Have we any opportunity to do anything of that kind?

General DAVIS. We stand in about the same position that the Government always stands when it is a plaintiff in a suit. I have been connected with land condemnations here in the United States when I saw the United States, as I thought, robbed roundly; but there was no help for it.

The CHAIRMAN. I think we had better have a board appointed, then, and put the General at the head of it.

General DAVIS. We took the land by the right of eminent domain, and had appraisers, and all that; but the appraised value was something tremendous.

Senator ANKENY. Pardon me there just one moment. In that adjustment would you not first contemplate an official survey of our boundaries, for instance?

General DAVIS. I do not think our rectangular survey would be applicable there at all. There ought to be a survey of the whole Zone, of course.

Senator ANKENY. Meanderings and all?

General DAVIS. It ought to be a topographical survey, and then let everybody claim where he pretends his lines run.

Senator ANKENY. I do not see how you can proceed without it. General DAVIS. It will have to be done, sir. It will have to be done, and it will unquestionably be done.

Senator KITTREDGE. In the event that a lock canal should be constructed at Panama, have you any opinion to express regarding the amount that it will cost us to pay for submerged lands?

General DAVIS. I stated before the Consulting Board that it was impossible for me to make an approximation to the figure that we would have to pay for the land. If I could answer the question by stating what I believe the land to be worth, I should say that the sum to be paid would not be large. But unfortunately the Government of the United States very seldom gets land by paying what it is worth. It is usual for the United States to pay three or four times the price of the land, and these Panamans understand the art of getting money out of their own Government or out of our Government or any government as well as the most skillful of our people do. I think we will have to pay very high prices for a great deal of this almost worthless land. I think it is inevitable that we will.

Senator MORGAN. Well, General, all of the questions about the condemnation of lands in the Zone and outside of the Zone are arranged pretty specifically by the Hay-Varilla treaty?

General DAVIS. Yes, sir; there is a plan provided.

Senator MORGAN. And commissioners have been appointed by both Governments to take up those cases and decide them?

General DAVIS. Yes, sir.

Senator MORGAN. What is the use of any intervention by the courts? General DAVIS. I will try to answer that question by relating my own experience in attempting to carry out the orders of the Govern

ment.

It was decided by the Isthmian Canal Commission, and concurred in by the Secretary of War, that a certain parcel of ground adjoining land owned by the United States near the city of Panama was neces

sary for canal purposes. I was instructed, as governor, to take the preliminary steps and see if a purchase of that land could be effected. I had an interview with the owner and endeavored to get him to name a price. It was some time before he was willing to name any figure, but at last he did. The land in question was principally lying on the slopes of Ancon Hill; one-third of it, or perhaps one-half of it, was available for building purposes. The other portion was a steep declivity, reaching to the height of 630 feet, and useless for almost every purpose that is, I mean to say these upper slopes.

At last the owner named a price which was, to my mind, about ten times the value of the land. I found out what he had paid for the land a few years before, and he was asking about ten times as much as he had paid a few years before. That is, he had bought it after the old French Canal Company had started on its boom; and yet he wanted ten times as much as he had paid.

I reported these facts. They told me to proceed under the treaty. I asked the Secretary of War to name two men to represent the United States in that board of arbitration. It is not called a board of arbitration, but a board of land appraisement. Notice was sent to the Panama Government to name two persons to represent it, proceeding always under the treaty. They did so. These four men met in the Isthmus of Panama and discussed the question of this land and its value. The Hay-Bunau-Varilla treaty provided for a fifth member of the board in case the four members could not agree. Fortunately it was not necessary to go as far as that; and the four men finally reached an agreement that we should pay for these thirty-odd acres of land, including one-third in a precipice, $11,700 gold. That price was referred to Washington. The Commission and the War Department felt that they had pursued the legally required steps in arriving at the price, and that there was no likelihood of getting a lower price by resorting to the method provided in the treaty of selecting a referee, which referee had to be agreed upon by the two Governments; and as the time was passing, authority was given to me to proceed and accept the appraised price, inform the owner of the appraisement, and, if he was willing to accept it, let him proceed to make his deeds. He was notified; he made his deeds; they were recorded; the title passed to the United States, and the auditing department paid the money.

Senator MORGAN. What was the necessity for having such a highpriced piece of land there?

General DAVIS. It was deemed to be essential for the requirements of the canal. It was exactly on the edge of this very large hospital that the French company had built. There was not a square rod of land in that neighborhood where quarters could be erected for the Government officers.

Senator KNOX. How much did you pay for it more than it was really worth?

General DAVIS. I think about four or five times what it was worth. I think it was four or five times what the man could have gotten for it on the ground by private sale.

Senator DRYDEN. Were the appraisers on the part of the United States Government Americans?

General DAVIS. Yes, sir; both of them were Americans. Both of them were persons selected by the Secretary of War, and men of high

character.

Senator KNOx. General, when you say that we paid four or five times as much as it was worth, what is the basis of your personal judgment as to the value?

General DAVIS. The prices at which transfers are made now and then of similar lands under similar conditions.

Senator KNOX. In the same locality?

General DAVIS. Not exactly the same locality, but close by.

Senator DRYDEN. Coming back to the cost of purchasing all these lands that are to be submerged, it has been stated by one witness that, in his judgment, it would probably cost the Government about $18.000.000 to buy those lands. Have you read that?

General DAVIS. Yes, I know; I think I have read that, and I believe another man said twenty-five millions.