WATERWAY DEFENSES 533 



gesting 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 rela- 

 tions 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 inter- 

 ruption, 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 Eiver, New York Bay, the Kill-von-Kull, the Delaware and 

 Earitan 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 en- 

 largement, and in some cases adequate or extra fortification to render 

 the entire sea-coast — if not impregnable, at least defensible to an ex- 

 tent 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 Jackson- 

 ville 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 com- 

 paratively 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 mani- 

 fest 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 multi- 



