Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/537

Rh enormous expense involved in the construction of armored forts; these all are foreign to the purpose of this paper, which is simply to point out how easily, and—considering the objects to be achieved—how cheaply, those two principles of defence—mutual defensive relations and concentration of floating forces—can be achieved.

With the map before you note the condition of existing waterways along our seaboard. From the eastern end of Long Island a series of continuous inland waterways begins that, with here and there an interruption, does not end till the coast of Florida is reached. Long Island Sound is now or soon will be amply defended from the sea. The East River, New York Bay, the Kill-von-Kull, the Delaware and Raritan Canal, the Delaware River, the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, the Chesapeake Bay, the Dismal Swamp Canal, Albermarle Sound, Pamlico Sound and beyond, almost continuous lagoons behind the Sea-Islands of North and South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, complete a chain of channels and artificial canals, awaiting only enlargement, and in some cases adequate or extra fortification to render the entire sea-coast—if not impregnable, at least defensible to an extent to which military men have long been alive; but to which the casual citizens (as well as their representatives in congress assembled) have been not only slumbering, but even in wakeful moments deaf, dumb and blind.

We may go even a little farther in the way of defensive suggestion, by including not only the Atlantic sea front, but also the gulf coast. A canal, surveyed and reported upon long ago by the United States Corps of Engineers, could be constructed at a trivial cost from Jacksonville to and down the Suwanee River. That such a canal has not already been constructed is owing to the fact that in a commercial sense it would not pay. Beyond Fisher's Island at the eastern extremity of Long Island Sound, for purposes of ample inland communication, a ship canal would need to be 'built' from near Watch-Hill to some point on Narragansett Bay, and another from near Fall River to New Bedford. Already a canal (designed for small coasting craft) has been projected and some work done, connecting Buzzard's and Cape Cod Bays. The fact stares us in the face, that with a series of channels requiring only construction or enlargement, connecting navigable and defensible inland bodies of water along the coast, nothing—or comparatively nothing—has been done to effect so great a war benefit. Of course this apathy has been due solely to that narrow commercial instinct—the so-called 'timidity of capital'—which has persisted in refusing even to traffic, to say nothing of national defense, the manifest gain that would come from judicious expenditure. Capital will not (as I have heard it expressed) 'sink money in a ditch.'

Some day, perhaps not in the far future, some of these frugal