Lippincotts Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 | Page 9

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.
There are three outlets for the commerce of these sections seeking New
York, the emporium of the New World, and the chief trans-Atlantic
markets: 1. By the Mississippi River to New