360 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1907. 
hospitable, and will entertain conflicting sentiments and contradic- 
tory opinions with much impartiality.” 
Let us now turn to America. The experience of that part of the 
world is not without instruction for us, even though the conditions 
under which most of the inland water traffic is there carried on are 
even more unlike those in our country than the conditions in Ger- 
many. The bulk of that traffic is the traffic of the Great Lakes, and 
so far as that is confined to the Great Lakes it corresponds, not to our 
inland water traffic, but to our coasting trade. By far the greater 
proportion of it is so restricted. But the Great Lakes also form part 
of two waterways from the interior to the seaboard, one Canadian 
and the other belonging to the United States. The Canadian is of 
course that of the St. Lawrence, leading to Montreal, and has peculiar 
advantages for carrying on an export trade in grain. Since the com- 
pletion, in 1899, of the improvements on the St. Lawrence there has 
been a minimum depth of 14 feet on the entire waterway. At the 
head of the route are the enormous grain—above all wheat—collecting 
points of Fort William in Canada and Duluth and Chicago in the 
United States. But as against these advantages it has to be remem- 
bered that the route is closed by ice for about five months or more every 
year. In spite of this drawback the waterway carries on an average 
much more than half the grain carried eastward to Montreal. In 
the thirteen years, 1893 to 1905, the water-borne proportion varied 
from 83 to a little more than 47 per cent, this minimum having been 
the limit of a regular decline in the proportion of grain so carried 
from 1895 to 1901. By 1905 the proportion of water-borne grain had 
risen again to nearly 72 per cent, but in this we may probably see the 
effect of the abolition, in 1903, of tolls on all grain carried through 
both the Welland and the St. Lawrence canals, though a toll of 10 
cents (say 5d.) a ton is still levied on all grain that passes through the 
St. Lawrence canals only. The meaning of this discrimination ob- 
viously is that on the heavy long hauls the railway is able to offer 
very effective competition even with this advantageous waterway. 
The success of this waterway has long ago inspired the Canadians 
with the idea of taking advantage of the geographical conditions to 
create a more effective waterway, offering the recommendations both 
of a shorter route and greater depth. This project is what is known 
as the Ottawa and Georgian Bay scheme. The promoters of this 
scheme urge that by deepening in places the river Ottawa, by utiliz- 
ing Lake Nipissing and its outlet the French river leading to Lake 
Huron, and by constructing the necessary canal connections, a water- 
way running nearly due west from Montreal would be substituted 
for that which first ascends a long distance to the southwest and then 
turns northward. In that way a saving of about 340 miles in the 
voyage to and from the higher lakes would be saved. Further, of 
