Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/539

Rh Perhaps even before the twentieth century is well out of its youth a hundred millions may not suffice as ransom. That sum, probably much less, spent properly now or within the next five years would go far indeed towards saving their terrors and their pockets.

All this that has been related in perhaps tedious detail has long been under consideration by our department of war. Time and again has laid before the president, the senate and house of representatives the data collected by the engineer corps with painstaking fidelity looking to an end so beneficial. The congress has been asked, urged, implored, in at least one instance where the expenditure required was trifling compared with the defensive result, to construct a deep waterway. Bills, from time to time, have been introduced—five or six in the last fifty years—but nothing has come of any of them of a practical character.

A slight study of the accompanying map showing a portion of our Atlantic seaboard will demonstrate, better perhaps than much argument, the necessity and, inferentially, the effectiveness, of a proposed series of deep water canals, parallel to the coast and connecting one after the other the landlocked and fort-defended rivers, bays and estuaries. From the extreme eastern terminus of the system at Cape Cod Bay, the first of these suggested artificial channels is that which would have its southern end in Buzzard's Bay. Next comes (all being denoted by thick black lines) a similar water communication between New Bedford and Fall River. Still another is proposed between Narragansett Bay and Long Island Sound near Stonington. After this, towards the southeast there is already natural deep-water communication, through the East River and New York harbor. It requires only the widening and deepening of the 'Delaware and Baritan' canal to open a well-defended inland waterway to the Delaware River.

Perhaps at the time we have instanced—not as an alarmist, but as a mere guide-post to possibilities of the future—when a foreign fleet appeared threatening Boston, in New Bedford harbor were a few ironclads. For them to hasten to the threatened point that little strip of sand cut through by a thirty-foot canal would mean perhaps salvation. But with the others cut, how quickly could our fleets gather; one from Newport, another from New London, reinforced—as they speedily would be—by all the naval strength gathered at the New York Navy Yard and at League Island on the Delaware.

But an even more potential presentation of the advantage of a ship-canal of sufficient depth to enable a war ship to pass through it is found in the projected cutting through of the narrow neck that separates the waters of the Delaware from those of the Chesapeake Bay. The suggested waterways between Long Island Sound and Narragansett Bay, and between Fall River and New Bedford have not even