OUR INLAND WATERWAYS 291 



the object of the instrument was to permit rather than to prevent 

 exercise of governmental functions, so comprehensive that it has met 

 and promises forever to meet a growth of commerce transcending the 

 most roseate dreams possible in 1787. 



The first-fruit of the constitution was renewed activity in com- 

 mercial development : Washington's difficulties on the Potomac passed, 

 and he planned an adjunct canal to connect the long-settled tide-water 

 region with the virgin Ohio country beyond the mountains; Dewitt 

 Clinton evolved his then stupendous project of uniting the Atlantic 

 seaboard and Lake Erie by an artificial waterway; and just a century 

 ago Albert Gallatin, sustained by the sympathy of Thomas Jefferson, 

 outlined a plan for waterway improvement and commercial develop- 

 ment which in broad adjustment of the means and ends of national 

 development has never been surpassed and seldom approached. 



With the conquest of natural power through the control of steam 

 (which indeed led to one of Marshall's masterly interpretations of the 

 "commerce clause") conditions changed, and the railway opened an 

 era in settlement and production such as the world never before saw 

 and may not see again — indeed, while material and immaterial agencies 

 can not well be compared, it is not too much to say that just as the 

 American constitution made our nation, so the American railway made 

 our country a world-power. Population and riches beyond the imagin- 

 ings of the nation's founders followed and were bound by the iron 

 bands until great commonwealths bridged the continent, until it were 

 easier to think of millions than of thousands before, until one seventh 

 of our swollen wealth came to be railway property and its ownership a 

 factor in law-making, until every-day ideas of domestic travel and 

 transportation came to connote railways alone. 



Meantime the prophetic visions of Washington and Jefferson and 

 Clinton and Gallatin faded — for a time. True, the canals projected 

 by the earlier commissioners along the Potomac and connecting Dela- 

 ware and Chesapeake Bays were constructed, Erie Canal was completed, 

 the Delaware and Raritan, Morris, Lehigh and a dozen others were 

 put into operation — yet they gradually passed into the ownership or 

 controlling influence of railway corporations, and half of them were 

 virtually abandoned. True, the steam packet traffic of the Mississippi 

 and Ohio attained high efficiency and a sumptuousness of appointment 

 starting back-woods simplicity toward culture, while the Missouri was 

 so navigated as to open the opulent storehouses of the vast northwest — 

 yet, as railway enterprise grew and the slip-shod ways of slave-labor 

 passed, the territory was tapped and the traffic transferred to overland 

 lines until river traffic was virtually dead, the water-fronts of every 

 river town from St. Paul to New Orleans (save " Natchez on the 

 Hill " ) controlled by railway interests, and the once resplendent river 



