and trade routes. So it was that when James Watt invented the steam engine and factories started up in England the people in New England were not long in abandoning the energy of the river for the energy stored up in coal.

And why was it? Simply because, although power could not be transported, coal could be carried to the place needed and there used to create steam for the steam engine. In this manner the villages and cities were not dependent upon the river, and the factories and towns could be located with reference to the seaports and railways, because, wherever located, power derived from the coal could be made on the spot.

It was James Watt, then, who was the great original emancipator of slavery. He made it possible for the race to substitute coal-power for man-power, and the infinite energy stored up in the coal-beds of the continent used to take the place of the pigmy energy of men meant that hereafter the race need not consume every working hour in which the sun gave light in the mere effort to keep themselves alive. It meant more comforts; more necessities; more luxuries and, above all, more recreation and more time to think of more ways to make the natural forces of nature do the drudgery of the world.

And so this new-found method of using the energy of coal diverted attention from the mighty power contained in the rushing rivers. People were too busy in using this new weapon for the conquering of a new country. They saw in it a means to real freedom. For in the new world the gaunt shadow of poverty which had pursued the race like a nightmare from the beginning of its existence, was as much in evidence under a new and untried form of government where men were called free as it had been in the Old World under the scepter of kings and the sway of monarchs. A half century of American independence had elapsed and it was evident that declarations and constitutions could not make men really free while they held in their hands the tools of serfs.

SUSPENSION TOWER SCHAGHTICOKE TRANSMISSION LINE

And now do we begin to see how wrapped up the river was destined to be in all this cosmos of industrial and political forces? For where town sites were located near water-falls the river still ran the mill or supplemented the steam plant. Far from the towns and cities, however, the water-falls were untouched, they tumbled in their primeval solitude as they had done before the white man set foot on the continent. Still the silver thread of the river was connecting, each advance step in civilization until finally, like a spider's web, its ramifications were. destined to touch in a greater or less degree every phase of American life.

But the discovery which was to make possible the use of the falls of the river, wherever located, had not yet come. The missing link which was to connect the river in the wilderness to the mills in the cities had not yet been discovered.

In the meantime great strides were being made along the line of transportation and agriculture. In England, the steam engine had been abandoned as a method of locomotion because it was not sufficiently perfected to compete with horses, and George Stephen

on the Blackstone River. At this point the first undershot wheels were also installed to turn the spindles of the cotton mills in an area destined in the future to contain many square miles of mills. It is therefore seen how vitally the rivers of New England contributed to her prosperity even before the days of power transmission. The invention of a Connecticut school master in the South had to be assisted by New England rivers before the raw cotton could be made into the completed textile.

So while the clicking blades of McCormick's reaper were severing the thongs which had bound Hunger and the race together with the first strands of yellow wheat, the rivers of New England were proceeding to clothe the people so cheaply that none were so poor that they could not afford to buy the cotton cloth.

In the same year of 1831 Peter

Cooper anticipated the growing demand for transportation by solving the problem with the abandoned tools of Stephenson. Peter Cooper built the first locomotive in the United States. It appeared simultaneously with the reaper. It weighed less than a ton, its boiler being about the size of a flour barrel and its flues made of gun barrels. It was the first application of steam to transportation in this country.

During this time while the enormous number of horse-powers of the rivers had been going to waste because there was no way to bring the power to the cities where it could be used, Faraday, back in England, had been slaving ten years in laboratory in an effort to invent some way to produce a continuous flow of electricity. Finally, in this same year of 1831, he discovered that he could generate a current of electricity in a loop of wire by revolving it transversely between the poles of a

magnet. The variation of the compass needle of his galvanometer connected in the circuit heralded the coming of a new order of things, the extent and possibilities of which Faraday himself did not even dream.

In fact the full commercial development and importance of this great discovery did not appear until the World's Fair in Chicago in our own days.

In the meantime, Peter Cooper's little flour barrel engine had developed into a 1500 horse-power locomotive running on steel rails at the rate of fifty miles an hour, and improvements in the reaper had greatly increased its efficiency and capacity. The development of Faraday's great discovery was so slow, however, as to be practically at a standstill. In those days the In those days the growing railroads were enabling people to transport goods and food-stuffs to distant places. Morse's telegraph was being perfected, so that gradually people were enabled to transmit thought considerable distances; but years were to elapse before Faraday's discovery was sufficiently developed so that people could transmit power from the place where it was manufactured by the steam engine instantly to the place of application. The power had to be used on the spot where it was made. So the streets were lighted by gas and oil lamps and the street cars were drawn by horses instead of electricity being made to do the work.

New England was settled and developed without that greatest of acquired human abilities-the ability to transport power. The system of electrical distribution had not arrived. was not until 1883 that the first alternating current generators were installed for the purpose of electric lighting and not until the World's Fair in Chicago, ten years later, that the country at last comprehended the possibilities of power as applied to traction lines, street cars, lighting and factories. It was not until ten years ago, with the first developments at Niagara Falls, the installation of immense water turbines weighing many tons and the

rising price of coal, that people saw a new vista open up before them which stretched their imaginations to the limit.

Faraday's discovery had opened up a tremendous field of hitherto untouched energy. And best of all, unlike the coal beds, it was not depleted by use but could be conserved by proper reservoirs and the protection of the timber on the water-sheds so that the flow of the streams and therefore the power production would be steady and of maximum output. Knowing the benefits which the race had derived from harnessing the energy contained in the coal beds, people were able to cast predictions as to the possible benefits to be derived from the harnessing of the energy of the rivers through this new ability to transmit power.

This, then, is the story of how the river has come into its own. The great water-falls were once admired for their beauty alone. Now it is seen that when the coal resources are exhausted they will be looked upon as the sole barrier between the race and slavery as the explorers seeking the North-West passage looked upon them as the barriers between the Atlantic and the great ocean to the West.

An

So important to the race has the river suddenly become that legislation. is on hand on all sides to conserve its flow. The Boston Merchants Association has recently passed a resolution urging action to prevent the destruction of forests on the high watersheds of the White Mountains. estimate of the unconserved flow of New England streams, or such a volume as is available during the nine months of an ordinary dry year, shows that there is a tremendous total of 600,000 horse-power as yet undeveloped on New England streams.

It is stated on good authority that a practically economical flood-flow conservation would practically double the present available water-power output. There are over four hundred million dollars invested in manufacturing interests in the streams in New Eng