Lands intersected by a narrow frith
Abhor each other.
But civilization has demonstrated that they subserve a much higher purpose, that the rivers of a country are its great arteries and highways of trade, and that they fulfill functions as numerous and benign in the political economy as in the physical geography of the regions they furrow. In the Old World, the advancing streams of culture, science and commerce, and even the migrations of nations, have ebbed and flowed along the classic valleys of the Rhine, the Rhone and the Danube; and the banks of the Tigris, the Euphrates and the Nile are rich in memories of the world's mightiest and most splendid empires. In America the fertile watersheds of the Ohio, the Mississippi and the Missouri are fast becoming what their antitypes of the great continent have been in the past. The outspreading wave of civilization and population has already reached westward to the foot of the Rocky Mountains from the Gulf of Mexico to Montana and Idaho, while even the basin of the Columbia River is rapidly filling up with an active, thriving and busy people, who can smile at the poet's vision:
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound
Save its own dashings.
The water-courses of a country are not less valuable to it than the little Pactolus was to the ancient city of Sardis, through whose streets it ran freighted with gold. But these natural highways of human intercourse, like most of Nature's provisions, are capable of indefinite artificial extension and multiplication. Our finest modern canals are scarcely smaller, and certainly capable of more uninterrupted, safe and heavy navigation, than many of the rivers which have figured in history, and which Pascal so graphically described as "moving roads that carry us whither we wish to go."
Such considerations as these have a profound bearing on many of the great economic problems of the age, but on none more than upon the grand problem which is now agitating the national mind in the United States: How to connect its seaboard and central regions by water. A glance at the map of the Union shows that its vast interior lies ensconced between the two mountain-walls of the Rocky chain on its western side and the Appalachian chain on its eastern side. Hemmed in by these barriers is the immense expanse of the most prolific, populous and prosperous section on the continent, which, taking its name from "the Father of Waters," is geographically designated as the Mississippi Valley, estimated by Professor J. W. Foster of the Chicago University to contain an area of two million four hundred and fifty-five thousand square miles, equal to that of all Europe excepting Russia, Norway and Sweden. Unlike the inland basin of Asia, in which the vast, mountain-girt Desert of Gobi stretches out its seas of sand, stony, sterile and desolate, the inland basin of America is its garden-spot and granary. Swept by the vapor-bearing winds and rain-distilling clouds from the Gulf of Mexico, and blessed with an excellent climate, it contains all the physical elements of an empire within itself. Its position makes it the national strong-hold, so that with military men it has grown into an adage, "Whoever is master of the Mississippi is lord of the continent." It is yet but half developed, but no far-seeing mind can form any estimate of its future growth and opulence. "With a varied and splendid entourage—an imperial cordon of States—nothing," says Dr. John W. Draper of New York, "can prevent the Mississippi Valley from becoming in less than three centuries the centre of human power." The only wall of partition that shuts it off from the great marts of the world is formed by the chain of the Alleghanies, which stretch along the Atlantic seaboard, from south-west to north-east, for twelve hundred miles. This natural barrier, with a mean altitude of two thousand feet, is destitute of a central axis, and consists, as the two Rogerses, who have most fully explored its ridges, showed, of a series of convex and concave flexures, "giving them the appearance of so many colossal entrenchments." With a broad artificial channel cut through its sunken defiles and picturesque gorges, there would at once be opened a gateway for the flow and reflow of the heavy commerce of the Western World.
In 1781 the practical and philosophic eye of Thomas Jefferson perceived the national necessity for a great trans-Alleghany water-line, and early in the year 1786, though still tossed on the wave of the Revolution, and not yet recovered from the shock of British invasion, the State which gave birth to the author of the "Declaration of Independence" declared for the enterprise. With all the means and energy at its command it pushed forward the work from year to year, and directed it, as Mr. Jefferson had proposed, so as to connect the head-waters of the James River, flowing from the Alleghany summits to the ocean, with the mountain-river known as the Great Kanawha, which rises near the fountains of the upper James and descends into the broad bosom of the Ohio. Although this undertaking was prosecuted slowly at first, it was permanently recognized as one that must go on; in 1832 and 1835 it received new impulses; and in 1840 it had reached the piedmont districts. In 1847 a powerful impetus was given to the work, and it was thenceforth, till 1856, forced rapidly westward up the eastern slopes of the Alleghanies, as a complete and working structure, above a point three hundred miles from the Atlantic capes, and two hundred miles from Richmond, leaving an unfinished gap to the upper or navigable part of Kanawha River of a little over one hundred and fifty miles. This enormous work was more than half finished at an outlay of $10,436,869—a sum which, during the economic period of its expenditure, went as far as nearly twice that amount would go now.
By recent legislation the State of Virginia proposes to turn over the entire property of the canal to the United States, on the sole condition of its being finished by the government and converted into a national water-highway for the good of the common country—in other words, upon the one condition of its nationalization.
It is sometimes contended that the day of canals has passed, and henceforward the railway must take their place. But this notion is opposed to the present economic necessities of the world, as well as to the provisions of Nature, which evidently point to the utilization of the hydraulic systems of the globe. The lavish and prodigal use of the coal-deposit of the earth, and the deforesting of vast tracts of soil to supply fuel for the locomotive and the stationary engine, have already wrought incalculable and almost irremediable evils. The past year has seen the prices of all English coals go up at least eighty per cent., and the coal-famine of Great Britain, foreseen some years ago, has already threatened to sap the vigor of her industrial systems and destroy her manufacturing supremacy, or, at any rate, place her at the mercy of the United States for the fuel with which to operate them. The denudation of the vast territories of the United States by the axe of emigration has already told in a marked degree upon the condition of its climate, and greatly affected its meteorology and rainfall; while the railroads, which have spread their Briarean arms over the whole country, by their immense consumption of wood for cross-ties, sills, fuel, snow-sheds, bridges, etc., have wellnigh stripped the land of its timber, leaving its bosom exposed to the biting blasts of winter and to the fiery blaze of the summer sun.
The problem of more rapid canal navigation is speedily approaching solution, and to give up the water-lines of the larger sections would be fatal to their commercial development. "The Erie Canal," said a distinguished citizen of New York a short time ago, "now conveys one-fourth of the whole export of that vast interior region I have described (the Mississippi drainage), and as much of it during its six months of uninterrupted navigation as all of the trunk railways together during the same time." "Every canal-boat," he added, "which comes to Albany with an average cargo is more than the average of the New York Central Railroad trains. In the busy canal season more than one hundred and fifty such boats come daily to tide-water, and the New York Central Railroad traffic never reaches thirty trains a day." Such a canal traffic would make more than twenty miles of uninterrupted railroad-cars, which could not, by any possibility, be handled by the largest force of railroad employés with expedition or convenience. The furore which the steam-engine has excited and so long maintained in the mechanical world is decidedly abating. Engineers are everywhere at work studying the practicability of employing new forces. The solar heat, the wind-power, the water-power of rivers, and even the tidal energy of the sea, have been and are now being harnessed to the machineries of Europe. These reservoirs of force are kept perennially full by the sun and the moon, to whose action they are due, and at a future period, when men have prodigally squandered their heritage of coal and wood wealth, they will be invoked by the mechanic and manufacturer to furnish their chief motive-power. As an economist of the force-capital deposited by the sun's influence in the bowels of the earth during its carboniferous epoch, and as using, instead of it, the force-interest received annually from the sun through the medium of rain and wind, the water-way will and must become one of the most generally employed engines of the higher civilizations yet to be.
So long as the subject of trans-Alleghany water-communication was viewed as one merely affecting individual States, it possessed no national interest. But in its present aspect it is of vast moment, both national and international. While many overcrowded portions of the Old World are often confronted with both the spectre and the reality of gaunt famine, and their breadless thousands are looking wistfully to the fresh and prolific fields of the New, for relief, there are annually lost to the country and the world vast stores of corn, which the Western farmers cannot afford to send by railroad to the seaboard for foreign shipment, and freely use as a substitute for fuel. This fact is suggestive and significant. To understand its import we have only to look at the geographical position of the West and the Mississippi Valley, isolated in the heart of a continent.