WATERWAY DEFENSES 535 



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 char- 

 acter. 



A slight study of the accompanying map showing a portion of our 

 Atlantic seaboard will demonstrate, better perhaps than much argu- 

 ment, 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 Eiver. Still another is proposed between 

 Narragansett Bay and Long Island Sound near Stonington. After 

 this, towards the southeast there is already natural deep-water com- 

 munication, through the East Eiver and New York harbor. It re- 

 quires only the widening and deepening of the ' Delaware and Baritan ' 

 canal to open a well-defended inland waterway to the Delaware Eiver. 



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 iron- 

 clads. 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 Nar- 

 ragansett Bay, and between Fall Eiver and New Bedford have not even 



