Address by Honorable William C. Redfield, Secretary of Commerce at Conference of Regional Chairmen | Page 3

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