ne of the
growth of the trivial hopes of the boy into the mighty achievement of
the man.

Ships could not be built on the Mississippi River. The twenty-foot
range in the water level would require the ways to make a long slope
into the current, a work of prohibitive expense, and as nearly
impossible from an engineering standpoint as anything can be.

Early in 1918 a committee of representative Orleanians began to study
the situation. This was known as the City Shipbuilding Committee. It
comprised Mayor Behrman, O. S. Morris, president of the Association of
Commerce; Walter Parker, manager of that body; Arthur McGuirk, special
counsel of the Dock Board; R. S. Hecht, president of the Hibernia Bank;
Dr. Paul H. Saunders, president of the Canal-Commercial Bank; J. D.
O'Keefe, vice-president of the Whitney-Central Bank; J. K. Newman,
financier; G. G. Earl, superintendent of the Sewerage and Water Board;
Hampton Reynolds, contractor; D. D. Moore, James M. Thompson and J.
Walker Ross, of the Times-Picayune, Item and States, respectively.

On February 10, 1918, this committee laid the plans for an industrial
basin, connected with the river by a lock, and ultimately to be
connected with the lake by a small barge canal. Ships could be built on
the banks of this basin, the water in which would have a fixed level.

Mr. Hecht, and Arthur McGuirk, special counsel of the Dock Board,
devised the plan by which the project could be financed. The Dock Board
would issue long-term bonds, and build the necessary levees with the
material excavated from the canal.

The committee's formal statement summarized the public need of this
facility as follows:

"1. It will provide practical, convenient and fixed-level water-front
sites for ship and boat building and repair plants, for industries and
commercial enterprises requiring water frontage.

"2. It will provide opportunities for all enterprises requiring
particular facilities on water frontage to create such facilities.

"3. It will permit the complete co-ordination, in the City of New
Orleans, of the traffic of the Mississippi River and its tributaries,
of the Intracoastal Canal, the railroads and the sea, under the most
convenient and satisfactory conditions.

"4. In connection with the publicly-owned facilities on the river
front, it will give New Orleans all the port and harbor advantages
enjoyed by Amsterdam with its canal system, Rotterdam and Antwerp with
their joint river and