ected by a narrow frith
Abhor each other.

But civilization has demonstrated that they subserve a much higher
purpose, that the rivers of a country are its great arteries and
highways of trade, and that they fulfill functions as numerous and
benign in the political economy as in the physical geography of the
regions they furrow. In the Old World, the advancing streams of culture,
science and commerce, and even the migrations of nations, have ebbed and
flowed along the classic valleys of the Rhine, the Rhone and the Danube;
and the banks of the Tigris, the Euphrates and the Nile are rich in
memories of the world's mightiest and most splendid empires. In America
the fertile watersheds of the Ohio, the Mississippi and the Missouri are
fast becoming what their antitypes of the great continent have been in
the past. The outspreading wave of civilization and population has
already reached westward to the foot of the Rocky Mountains from the
Gulf of Mexico to Montana and Idaho, while even the basin of the
Columbia River is rapidly filling up with an active, thriving and busy
people, who can smile at the poet's vision:

Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound
Save its own dashings.

The water-courses of a country are not less valuable to it than the
little Pactolus was to the ancient city of Sardis, through whose streets
it ran freighted with gold. But these natural highways of human
intercourse, like most of Nature's provisions, are capable of indefinite
artificial extension and multiplication. Our finest modern canals are
scarcely smaller, and certainly capable of more uninterrupted, safe and
heavy navigation, than many of the rivers which have figured in history,
and which Pascal so graphically described as "_moving roads_ that carry
us whither we wish to go."

Such considerations as these have a profound bearing on many of the
great economic problems of the age, but on none more than upon the grand
problem which is now agitating the national mind in the United States:
_How to connect its seaboard and central regions by water_. A glance at
the map of the Union shows that its vast interior lies ensconced between
the two mountain-walls of the Rocky chain on its western side and the
Appalachian chain on its eastern side. Hemmed in by these barriers is
the immense expanse of the most prolific, populous and prosperous
section on the continent, which, taking its name from "the Father of
Waters," is geographical