362 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1907. 
£21,000,000 in making a canal with branches with a depth of 12 feet, 
and capable of accommodating barges of 1,000 tons, on the routes 
shown on the accompanying map. 
Of the natural inland waterways of the United States, in addition 
to the Great Lakes, the Mississippi offers advantages for traflic of a 
kind to which not merely our own country, but the whole continent of 
Europe, can offer no parallel. Yet it is a very striking fact that even 
on these the ordinary steamer traffic has shown a great decline. No 
general statistics have, I believe, been collected since 1889, but the 
Tenth and Eleventh censuses of the United States allow of a com- 
parison being made between the total traffic of 1880 and that of 1889, 
between which years the total amount of traffic carried on steamers in 
the Mississippi valley generally sank from 13.6 to 10.8, that on the 
wee Line of Fresent Canal Champiaiy 
not tobe rebuilt. 
eax Line of Present Cana! 
tobe rebuilt. 
Nat. scale |:4.600,000 
203° Stat.miles. 
Fic. 3.—New York State canals constructing under a law of 1903. 
Ohio from 9.2 to 3.8 millions of tons. In 1901 the total quantity of 
goods received at New Orleans from the interior was less than 5 per 
cent of that received by all routes.* Still, from the Mississippi and 
Ohio we can obtain illustrations of the kind of traffic in which good 
waterways are even now successful. St. Louis is a great collecting 
point for grain. In 1903 more than 80 per cent of the wheat and 
about 40 per cent of the maize dispatched thence for export to New 
Orleans went by river, and by this route rates for wheat on through 
bills of lading to Liverpool are only about two-thirds of those by 
way of New York.’ Yet the facts, even of this trade, give us a hint 
also of what waterways fail to do, for only about one-seventh of the 
wheat and one-thirteenth of the maize exported in that year from 
New Orleans came to the port by water. 
@ See the data in the Foreign Office Report, Annual Series, No. 2752, pp. 4, 5. 
> Foreign Office Report, Annual Series, No. 3202, pp. 48, 49. 
