ded
against renewed war.

"Do you think so, Sir?" Chancellor Kent is said to have asked the
Governor.

"Yes, Sir," was the reported reply. "England will never forgive us for
our victories, and, my word for it, we shall have another war with her
within two years."

The Chancellor rose to his feet with determination and sealed the fate
of the great enterprise in a word.

"If we must have war," he exclaimed, "I am in favor of the canal and I
cast my vote for this bill."

On July 4, 1817, work was formally inaugurated at Rome with simple
ceremonies. Thus the year 1817 was marked by three great undertakings:
the navigation of the Mississippi River upstream and down by steamboats,
the opening of the national road across the Alleghany Mountains, and the
beginning of the Erie Canal. No single year in the early history of
the United States witnessed three such important events in the material
progress of the country.

What days the ancient "Long House of the Iroquois" now saw! The
engineers of the Cumberland Road, now nearing the Ohio River, had
enjoyed the advantage of many precedents and examples; but the
Commissioners of the Erie Canal had been able to study only such crude
examples of canal-building as America then afforded. Never on any
continent had such an inaccessible region been pierced by such a
highway. The total length of the whole network of canals in Great
Britain did not equal that of the waterway which the New Yorkers now
undertook to build. The lack of roads, materials, vehicles, methods of
drilling and efficient business systems was overcome by sheer patience
and perseverance in experiment. The frozen winter roads saved the day
by making it possible to accumulate a proper supply of provisions and
materials. As tools of construction, the plough and scraper with
their greater capacity for work soon supplanted the shovel and the
wheelbarrow, which had been the chief implements for such construction
in Europe. Strange new machinery born of Mother Necessity was now heard
groaning in the dark swamps of New York. These giants, worked by means
of a cable, wheel, and endless screw, were made to hoist green stumps
bodily from the ground and, without the use of axe, to lay trees
prostrate, root and branch. A new plough was fashioned with which a yoke
of oxen could cut roots two inches in thickness well beneath the surface
of the ground.

Handicaps of various sorts wore the patience of commissioners,
engineers,