ken a return cargo of coal instead of rushing back light for more
ore. As the vessels of the ore fleet are owned in the main by the steel
trust, their earnings are a consideration second to their efficiency in
keeping the mills supplied with ore.

The great canal at Sault Ste. Marie which has caused this prodigious
development of the lake shipping has been under constant construction and
reconstruction for almost half a century. It had its origin in a gift of
750,000 acres of public lands from the United States Government to the
State of Michigan. The State, in its turn, passed the lands on to a
private company which built the canal. This work was wholly
unsatisfactory, and very wisely the Government took the control of this
artificial waterway out of private hands and assumed its management
itself. At once it expended about $8,000,000 upon the enlargement and
improvement of the canal. Scarcely was it opened before the ratio at which
the traffic increased showed that it would not long be sufficient.
Enlarged in 1881, it gave a capacity of from fourteen feet, nine inches to
fifteen feet in depth, and with locks only four hundred feet in length.
Even a ditch of this size proved of inestimable value in helping vessels
to avoid the eighteen feet drop between Lake Superior and Lake Huron. By
1886 the tonnage which passed through the canal each year exceeded
9,000,000, and then for the first time this great waterway with a season
limited to eight or nine months, exceeded in the volume of its traffic the
great Suez canal. But shippers at once began to complain of its
dimensions. Vessels were constantly increasing both in length and in
draught, and the development of the great iron fields gave assurance that
a new and prodigious industry would add largely to the size of the fleet,
which up to that time had mainly been employed in carrying grain.
Accordingly the Government rebuilt the locks until they now are one
hundred feet in width, twenty-one feet deep, and twelve hundred feet
long. Immediately vessels were built of a size which tests even this great
capacity, and while the traffic through De Lessep's famous canal at Suez
has for a decade remained almost stationary, being 9,308,152 tons, in
1900, the traffic through the "Soo" has increased in almost arithmetical
proportion every year, attaining in 1901, 24,696,736 tons, or more than
the combined tonnage of the Suez, Kiel, and Manchester canals, though the
"Soo" is closed four