Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/309

Rh flour moved in the direction of tide water. The total of tolls in the last year of its official life was over 20,000 dollars. The story of the coal moved is better told in the amount carried by the Cayuga and Seneca Lakes Canal, and partly distributed by the Genesee Valley, which was 400,000 tons, now reduced to a few boatloads to accommodate the railroads and not the public. There could not possibly have been serious loss to the state from the Genesee Valley Canal and yet it passed the" way of the other waterways. This canal offers the most picturesque ruins. A railway runs along the bottom for a part of the way. The remains of the works at Dansville have a kind of melancholy grandeur; a sad evidence of the greed and folly of man.

It is only a matter of time when the subsidary canals will be rebuilt. With the increased value of material and labor, it will cost hundreds of thousands while the original represented thousands. It will not be a question of money. It will be an overmastering impulse to equal the best in canal structure. France, Germany, Belgium, Holland will be the criteria. There appears every prospect that the roads will take their normal place as freight carriers.

It is planned to build a canal from the great lakes to Pittsburg, thence to the Gulf. Such a waterway, if constructed with a view of paying interest on the investment, will never be built. As a check to the greed of the railways, as x a plan to place them in normal accord with the transportation interests of the country, it will prove an unalloyed blessing. Of more value than all else will be the vast tide of traffic that will seek the cheap route of the canals. Seen from this point the canals will always pay. The lateral waterways of New York, in their darkest hour, paid the people manyfold. The sin of the abandoned canals rests to-day upon this charming region. The fleets of steamers, sloops and barges have disappeared and the lakes have drifted back to primeval solitude.