C

HICAGO is to become a sea-port! The greatest inland city of our continent is to be made an active competitor for the world trade that is transported in ships, and to receive directly at its own wharves the argosies of the old world and of the southern seas.

And it is to be compassed by bringing the coast to Chicago and not by moving the city to the sea. For a loop is to be taken in the coast-line, as it were, and it is to be drawn up from the Gulf of Mexico and through the valley of the Mississippi and the Illinois and hooked over a good stout mooring at the gateway of Lake Michigan, forever uniting salt and fresh water seas. The Mississippi is to

carry something else, in millions of tons, besides sediment, and twenty-two great prosperous states of our Middle West are to come into their own.

For years a gradually swelling cry has been going up from the valley of the great river, strangely like a magically multiplied echo of prophetic words spoken centuries ago. "Give us our river-our

LOVERS' LEAP.

highway to the sea," is the burden of the plaint that has the very sound of Marquette's inspired foretelling, when he first drifted down the mighty stream with Joliet in 1673. There has been a strange hiatus in the echo, it is true, for it has not been plainly heard till now, but its vibrations have found a sensitive sounding-board in dire need at last, and are waking the nation.

In the valley of the Father of Waters, there are fifteen thousand miles of rivers. They tap a section of our country where something like ten billion dollars' worth of finished products is the yearly output; where forty per cent of the area of our fertile land is without an adequate market; where inexhaustible resources are yet scarcely drawn upon; where the growth of business is outstripping the utmost possibilities in railroad building, five to one. They are the natural highways of this great section which even now produces three-quarters of our exports, the bulk of our agricultural products and seventy-five per cent of our manufactures. The time for the beginning of their development is near, for business opportunity in this great middle. west is hanging like ripe fruit, suffering for the picking.

The proposed Lakes-to-Gulf deep waterway, which has so many friends and some such bitter enemies is only the beginning of what is to be done, but it is a big beginning. The railroads cannot keep up with the business that is fairly bursting all bounds of expectation.

They are losing ground in the struggle, and railroad men, who once opposed the inland waterways, are now urgent in advocacy of this mighty one, with dire prophecy concerning delay or neglect. The only problem that stands in the way is an engineering, not a financial one, for there will be money enough for the work, when the engineers decide how it is to be used.

Organizations of the most progressive and far-sighted business men. of the valley have been formed in the various cities and almost every town, hamlet and farm in the whole section has earnest advocates of the undertaking. It was in response to the united invitation of the governors of a dozen states that President Roosevelt made his recent trip down the river to attend the convention at Mem

phis, when he gave clear evidence of his hearty support of the plan. A bill is now before Congress calling for the issuing of bonds to the amount of $500,000,000, for the improvement of rivers and it was inspired by the great interest in this one project.

When it is realized that one vessel of two thousand tons burden can float the loads of two trains of thirty cars each of average capacity, down the broad brown

bosom of the river, at a cost of about one-sixth of railroad charges, it is no wonder that this fact alone interests everyone who has a pound of freight to move. And when it is known that the thousands of tons of products that might be shipped cannot now find carriers at any price, there is no doubt about the building of the canal; the force behind the plan makes it a certainty. It will be the only saving of the Mississippi valley.

It has been stated that the Lakes-to

Gulf canal is as important as the Panama canal itself and the statement is conservative. To have an unobstructed passage by water for freight from all the great section bordering on our inland seas, through the heart of our richest middle. country to which a thousand feeders would immediately bring from other thousands of sources, streams of traffic like the rivers themselves, flowing endlessly from the springs of interior industry, will be of value incalculable. No

single investment the government and people of the United States could make will pay better. It is doubtful if any other would pay so well. Waterway competition will pull down railroad rates, and such a waterway as this can handle our present business and give opportunity for development the railroads can never give. For every dollar invested two will be saved in rates in a period less than the period of building. And the value of adequate facilities for development cannot be guessed at, for opportunity cannot be priced.

It will cost $100,000,000 to build the deep waterway from the Lakes to the Gulf. The government engineers reported in 1904 that it would require $31,000,000 to deepen the Mississippi and Illinois rivers from St. Louis to Chicago. But this upper part of the way is simple in comparison with that below St. Louis. The Mississippi is a river of mud banks and mud bottom. It is supposed to have a channel below St. Louis of eight to nine feet depth, but that channel shifts like a ribbon in a breeze. Dozens of feet of silt may be deposited by the laden waters in a week and swept away in a night. Dredging under such conditions is useless and by whatever plan the canal is built, it will have to control this restless change.

Wandering, willful, headstrong, obstinate, resistless, the river which has grown old in habits of indifference to bounds of any kind must be fettered and led, like a big brown slave, to the fetching and carrying, and to the turning of wheelsfor waterpower is to be one of the priceless "by-products" of the general plan. Geologists say that the huge, blind, unguided worker, with its sinews of matchless power, brings down in its giant grip each

year 400,000,000 tons of rich earth it has filched on its ruthless way from the Minnesota lakes to the southland. Swirling and twisting at the mercy of the river's whim, this huge bulk slips and slides to and fro, forward and back, filling or banking up or sucking away, in constant, uncontrollable drift, with the uncertainty of clouds in the sky.. From Cairo to the Gulf, the river rides a ridge of its own building, high above the adjacent country, where only dikes keep it in its

course.

Yet it has been the visionary schemes and plans brought forward by those only partly familiar with the problems involved that have stirred most of the opposition the general scheme has met. One idea, that the 400,000,000 tons of sediment should be kept "in the townships where it belongs," is a specimen of the notions advanced. The plan proposed in the last river and harbor bill before Congress, of appointing a board to report on the practicability of a fourteenfoot channel from St. Louis to the Gulf, suggests turning a portion of the route into a canal with locks and dams, and this idea has met with storms of criticism and protest. But ignorance is also responsible for much of this. General knowledge on the subject may even fairly be represented by the recent extravagant speech in Congress, which pictured the proposed canal as having "two granite walls, two hundred feet high and two thousand miles long," in comparison with which the famous Chinese wall, twenty feet high and twelve hundred and fifty miles in length, would be insignificant. This is absurd, of course, but when it is considered that the difference between the river's high water mark in the

WHERE THE SHADOWS PLAY HIDE-AND-SEEK WITH THE SUNSHINE, IN FISHBOURN CANYON.