THE CANALS: A GLORY OF FRANCE^ 



BY 

 J. J. Jusserand, French Ambassador at Washington 



OME nineteen hundred years ago, a it stands a characteristic statue of that 

 small town existed in a small isl- model of energy, Lesseps, who points 



S 



and of a little known river. The town to the canal and seems to say: "The 

 being surrounded by water, its princi- canal an impossibility? Be so good as 

 pal corporation was that of the boat- to look : there it is !" 

 men ; they had placed themselves under We hold the record for the present; 

 the protection of Jupiter and dedicated you will hold it in your turn when the 

 an altar to him. The altar still exists ; great Panama Canal is finished ; we 

 it was discovered in the eighteenth cen- turned the first sod ; you will turn the 

 tury under the choir of Notre Dame ; last ; and no one will applaud more 

 for the little town I speak of was soon heartily than your predecessors, 

 to outgrow its island and was to be- Apart from these great attempts ben- 

 come Paris, the capital of France ; and efitting mankind at large rather than 

 now, I venture to say, a "city of any single country, France has done 

 renown." good work indeed on her own soil. 



After a good many centuries, when From the Renaissance, when the use of 



the fashion came for armorial bearings locks was first invented, the great plan 



and emblems, Paris, continuing the was started which was to connect, 



same traditions, chose for emblem a through mountains and valleys, aH the 



ship, with the famous motto, "Fluctuat rivers of France and all the oceans and 



nee mergitur." Tempests may toss but seas washing her shores. First it was 



shall never sink her ; which has proven the canal of Briare, connecting the 



true, throughout ages, of the ship, of Seine and the Loire, begun by Henry 



the town, and of the country too. the Fourth's great minister. Sully, in 



What tempests, what hard days, what 1605; then it was the great canal ot 



dangers ! And yet the ship is afloat ; Languedoc, connecting the Atlantic 



very much so. Ocean and the Mediterranean, built in 



In these facts can be detected, as it eighteen years by Riquet, under Louis 

 were, an omen of what was to follow, the Fourteenth, and one of the glories 

 The patient, hard-working, careful of the reign, It long remained a model 

 French people, believed by some to one, and caused the admiration of tra- 

 .spend all their time in reading novels, velers. Visiting France more than a 

 singing songs and amusing themselves, century later, Arthur Young, the fa- 

 could not fail to do for waterways mous English economist, wrote : "The 

 what they did for .oadways, and so it canal of Languedoc is the capital fea- 

 is that the development given by thern ture of all the country. * * * It is 

 to their inland harbors and canals has a noble and stupendous work ; goes 

 secured for me the honor of address- through the hill about the breadth of 

 ing this brilliant assembly of conscien- three toises (19. 18 ft.) * * * Nine 

 tious, painstaking and patriotic Ameri- sluice-gates let the water down the hill 

 cans. And I owe it also, perhaps, to to join the river at Beziers. A noble 

 the remembrance that the biggest canal work t * * * Many vessels were at 

 in the world, one dreamt of by Greek, the quay, some in motion, and every 

 Roman and Moslem, one which Mar- sign of animated business. This is the 

 lowe's Tamburlaine, dying, regretted best sight I have seen in France. Here, 

 not to have opened, the Suez Canal, Louis XIV, thou art truly great ! Here 

 was planned by a Frenchman, executed with a generous and benignant hand 

 by Frenchmen, and built in ten year?, thou dispensest ease and wealth to thy 

 from 1859 to 1869. At the entrance of people." And as Young was writing 



*Address before the National Rivers and Harbors Congress, at Washington, D. 

 C, December 4, 1907. 



