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536 yet been so much as thought of; the Cape Cod cutting, though for over two centuries planned for, and even partially worked, has been regarded solely in the light of a commercial venture. Of all these proposed canals but one has received attention from the United States. This one is the cutting of the divide between the Chesapeake Bay and the Delaware River. In 1894 a commission, authorized by congress and appointed by the president, examined numerous routes already surveyed across the Maryland-Delaware peninsula, with the result that they recommended the route known as the 'Back Creek' or 'Elk River' route, the most northerly of all. Much interest had been taken in a projected canal in Baltimore; but it was wholly in the light of a commercial benefit. The advantage of the route selected—though manifest from a military standpoint—was not perceptible to the practical minds of the traders of the thrifty city. The commission had been required to select that one of six or eight routes (the most southerly being that known as the 'Choptank') which should be most advantageous in ways of commerce as well as those of war.

Baltimore's shippers, willing enough to admit the theoretical benefits of the route selected from a military standpoint, declared with one voice that it possessed none whatever of a commercial character. It would be as well, they said, if not better, to continue to come and go by the old route down the Chesapeake to the capes of Virginia. There was not enough public spirit in congress to incite to action from any purely military considerations; the incentive of private commercial interest being lacking, the project dropped like lead. Ten years passed, and then, at the first session of the fifty-eighth congress a bill was introduced in the house of representatives, and another (at the second session) in the senate, both having for object the purchase by the United States of the 'chartered rights' of the 'Chesapeake and Delaware Canal,' located on the line of the so-called 'Back-Creek,' and the construction of a free ship-canal thereon. Both of these bills failed to get past the committees to which they were referred. Again in 1905 a joint resolution (introduced by Mr. Mudd of Maryland) was referred to the committee on railways and canals. It appeared that this measure was likely to meet the same fate as its predecessors; but interest in the project was aroused in the committee, and intelligent scrutiny; the resolution was modified to the extent that all the so-called 'southern routes' (manifestly of no utility in a military sense) were eliminated, and consideration confined to the two most northerly routes—the 'Back Creek' and the Sassafras. In this shape the joint resolution passed both houses; it was approved by the president, and a commission was appointed to decide which of the two routes was the better, in view of 'probable cost and commercial advantages and military and naval uses of each,' with a view to constructing by the United States of a 'free and open waterway.'