What the St. Lawrence Waterway Means to the United States

Abstract

THE demand throughout the west for a ship channel outlet from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean, by way of the St. Lawrence, rests upon the need of that region for more direct and cheaper connection with the markets of the world, and also upon the physical make-up of the North American continent, which lends itself, by reason of the location, depth, and breadth of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River, to such a connection -a connection that would give to the North American continent, a fourth ocean, its shores reaching to the borders of the harvest fields of the Middle West, now removed a thousand miles and more from contact with the sea. On no other continent has civilization entrenched itself at any considerable distance from the ocean. On this continent alone it has done so under conditions that do not assure its continuance, unless the transportation handicap that distance from the sea always and everywhere involves be removed. The North American mid-continent was claimed for civilization under peculiar conditions. The movement fr6m the Atlantic over the mountains and into the plains beyond began before the days of the steamboat or of the railroad, and when the tools of industry and agriculture were for the most part as crude as they were in the days of Caesar. Not even the plow was yet an efficient tool, and the grain drill, the binder, the threshing machine were all unknown. The agriculture of western European lands was settled in its ways, and that of our now great competitors-Argentina, Australia, Russia -was not a factor in world tradei fact, did not cast a shadow over the future. We invented the steamboat, we adapted the railroad, we improved the plow, we invented the reaper, the grain drill, the threshing machine and the modern binder, and we developed, ahead of any other nation, all of these hi gs and put them to our purpose of subduing a continent. By the most ingenious system of bonuses ever known to history, we invited the pioneers of three generations to put the lands of the interior under cultivation-lands that, for the larger part were level, treeless and rich and that made our quick results of large acreage under the plow and large production possible. We financed our wars out of these lands. We held out to our farmers as a reward for their labor, not a fair return in cash for the crops harvested, but an increasing equity in the lands themselves, as the country might settle up and the value of the lands might increase. The network of our railroads spread over the interior and on to the Pacific. The iron ores of Minnesota, the copper of Michigan and of Montana, the output of the smelters in the Rockies was added to the golden harvest of the farmers. The inland ocean of the Great Lakes became busy with a water-borne commerce that told of the rising greatness of Buffalo, Toledo, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Du-