So the railway came along and since the mechanical engine fitted so perfectly into the American temperament and the national needs, the railway and the tool for the railway developed together side by side. Still with the coming of the railroad we thought of transportation as a unity. Highways did not amount to very much. Men went by horseback often, because they had to, not always because they wanted to. And after the railroad came, the waterway was all but destroyed, because we thought of transportation as a unity of railroads. Up to a very few years ago all of us who are not far-seeing would have thought of public transportation as meaning essentially the railroads. Yet so rapidly in the last five years has the law of transportation been developed that it is a little bit difficult for us to keep up with the rush of this movement.

There came into the world a new tool—the internal-combustion engine—destined to work almost as great a change in the human life as the steam engine in its time, making possible a tool for the waterway that the waterway had never had before, making it possible to use for the highway what the highway had never had before, making necessary the alteration of the highway to suit the new tool built for it. It has never been true until now; it has just now become true that the waterway and highway have been, as regards the tools for their use, on a technical and scientific level with the railway. The Government is just putting in operation this month the first great barges for the Mississippi River intended to carry ore south and coal north, made possible because of the internal-combustion engine. The tool has come, the internal-combustion engine is altering the face of the marine world. So that we do not really need but over 6 feet of water in the northern Mississippi to carry 1,800 tons of ore in one boat. We look upon the development of the New York State barge canal with a certainty of its profitable use for the Nation, for with a 12-foot draft we know we can carry 2,500 tons in any vessel constructed for the purpose, driven by internal-combustion engines. The tool for the job and the way made ready for the tool.

I go into my shop to put up a hammer. What is the essential feature of my hammer's operation? The foundation. It may be the most powerful hammer made, but unless given a sufficient sub-structure it can only be destructive. So for the waterway, so for the highway. You may have the most perfect equipment for their use but the instrument must work in a proper environment. So the waterway, then, the last few years—in fact, very recently—has come rapidly into its own. It is within 18 months, gentlemen, that I stood upon the first load of ore going south on the Mississippi River and saw it enter the port of St. Louis. It was only yesterday that I sent to the Senate my formal report urging Government ownership and operation of all the northern coastal canals from North Carolina to New England, with the certainty that adequate and efficient vessels could be provided for their use.

Now, these three ways of transporting developed to their full are not hostile to each other. In the days of our ignorance we thought they were. In other times the railroad bought canals to suppress them. But we have learned a larger outlook now and the congestion so recently as a year ago taught us that there are certain kinds of goods, certain types of transportation, that the railways of this country can not afford to do. Certain great items of bulk freight they must always carry. We should starve for steel if we had to depend upon our railroads to bring the ores from Minnesota to Pittsburgh, and the Northwest would be in a hard case if we had always to send coal to them by rail from the region of the East. We are learning that there is a differentiation in transportation. So these two enemies of the past are likely to operate as friends to-day. It is not a strange thing that the internal waterways of the country are at this time being operated by the Railroad Administration. It means an advance in thought.

I told the Director General of Railways that two-thirds of the job was fairly well in hand, but that he had left out one-third, and that I thought he would not get his unity complete until he made it a trinity by taking in the highways. I told him that the highways as a transportation system and their development both as to roads and as to means of using the roads were quite as essential to the country as the other two. In reply he suggested that it was a larger job than he himself could undertake, with the railroads and the waterways on his hands, and asked me if I would not do it. To my regret I was obliged to refuse. The law does not give me authority. I should have been glad if I could have had more of a part in it, because, given your perfected railroad—and I speak as a friend of the railroad and a friend of the waterway, which I think is also coming into its own—I am convinced that neither will reach its normal place as a servant of the people unless linked up with motor-truck routes.

There is a steamboat line running from New Haven to New York. At New Haven lines of motor trucks radiate out in several directions. From this radius around New Haven for many miles in three directions the motor trucks come down in the evening to the boat. The boat leaves a little before midnight and arrives in New York in the morning, when the freight is transferred and goes out on the early trains for the West. It is a good system of interlocking service such as we have got to have.

My conception of the future of the New York Barge Canal and the canal across New Jersey and the Chesapeake and Ohio and all the waterways is that the companies operating on them shall pick up and deliver at every important terminal point by lines which shall radiate out by motor trucks from 50 to 100 miles, and they shall take from these places goods thus brought to their station. So that if when, for example, they were delivering goods from Kentucky to Illinois, it might start from a farm or from an inland village by motor truck and go to the nearest waterway station, there to be picked up by a vessel and to be carried down the Kentucky and Ohio to a point sufficiently near in Illinois to where it was to go, there to be picked up by motor trucks which would carry it to its destination, and it should be billed through by one bill of lading. That would definitely establish that the vehicles and highways are not accidental or incidental but an essential factor. That, it seems to me, is what we are coming to before very long. I imagine we will come to it almost before we think of it.

From that are a number of inferences. The public authorities have got to be sufficiently educated to make a good thing possible. They have got to learn, as many a farmer has to learn, that the most costly thing in the world is a bad road; that as compared with seal-skin furs and platinum mud is far more costly an item; and that there is no such evidence of a muddy state of mind in a community as a muddy state of highways in the community. They go together—mental and physical mud.

Now, let us see whether our idea is false or true in its application. The Hudson River has by it six tracks of railroad. The fleet of vessels upon the Hudson River was never as great, never so new or well equipped as to-day. The vessel with the largest passenger capacity, or at least second largest (6,000 persons), is in operation on that river. The freight carried on the river amounts to over 8,000,000 tons a year by water. I put a factory at Troy because I could get by water express service at freight rates, loading machines on the boat in the evening and have them delivered in New York the next morning, while to ship the same material by railroad to New York would require three to five days by freight.

Directly back from the river bank on either side are two of our fine highways. Neither the railroad nor the river meet all the needs of the men living on those roads. You might build the railroads up until they are 10 tracks wide, but you do not fully help the farmer 10 miles away to get his produce to market. And you might fill the river with steamers, and he may be still isolated. There must come something to his farm which transports his produce easily and systematically and in harmony with other methods in duplex action going and coming. So our friend the farmer must have the rural express or its equivalent, which comes to his door, which in the morning connects him up with all the round earth and brings him what he wants of the earth's products back to his door that night.