laced
before us a letter from the chief engineer of the Manchester Ship Canal,
who is emphatically in favor of a sea-level waterway. It would have been
much more interesting and much more valuable to the members of Congress
to have received from Mr. Hunter a statement as to why he should have
changed his opinions; or why, in 1898, he should have signed the
unanimous report of the technical commission in favor of a lock canal,
while now he so emphatically sustains those who favor the sea-level
project. It is not going too far to say, appealing to the facts of
history, that Mr. Hunter may be seriously in error in this matter and
may have drawn upon his imagination rather than upon his engineering
experience, the same as Mr. Robert Stephenson was in serious error in
his bitter opposition to the canal enterprise at Suez.

Mr. Hunter, in his letter, argues, among other points, that the lifts of
the proposed locks would be without precedent. Without precedent? Why,
of course, they would be without precedent. Is not practically every
large American engineering enterprise without precedent? Was not the
Erie Canal, completed in 1825, without precedent? Were not the first
steamboat and the first locomotive without precedent? Were not the
Hoosac Tunnel and the Brooklyn Bridge feats of American engineering
enterprise without precedent?

Without precedent is the great barge canal which the State of New York
is about to build, which will mean a complete reconstruction of the
existing waterway which connects the ocean with the Great Lakes.[3]

All this is without precedent. But it is American. It is progress, and
takes the necessary risk to leave the world better, at least in a
material way, than we found it. In the proposed deep waterway, which is
certain some day to be built to connect the uttermost ends of the Great
Lakes with tide-water on the Atlantic, able and competent engineers of
the largest experience have designed locks with a lift of 52 feet.[4]
That will be without precedent. On the Oswego Canal, proposed as a part
of the new barge canal of the State of New York, there will be six
locks, two of which will each have a lift of 28 feet,[5] and that will
be without precedent, but neither dangerous nor detrimental to
navigation interests.

Need I further appeal to the facts of past canal history? Is it
necessary to recite one of the best known and most honorable chapters in
the history of inland waterways--I mean the probl