THE HISTORY AND ECONOMIC VALUE OF CANALvS. 39 



A young Virginia engineer, previously on the Braddock campaign, 

 was the first to advocate a canal company. It was George Washington 

 who initiated the project of connecting the Potomac and the Ohio by an 

 artificial waterway over the Alleghenies; nor did the revolutionary war 

 diminish his interest in that enterprise. Senator Lodge says in his Life 

 of Washington, "whether he was writing of canals or the Mississippi or 

 the western posts he always was arguing and urging union and an energetic 

 central government." Oliver, an Englishman, in his Life of Hamilton 

 writes under the heading, "The Power of a Vision" — "In the early spring 

 of 1785, a modest but memorable meeting took place at Washington's 

 country seat. Mount Vernon, between representatives of the states of Mary- 

 land and Virginia. The occasion was a conference in regard to waterways 

 between the eastern settlements and the western unpeopled land." It 

 was necessary to unite the more or less disassociated states by some com- 

 mon cause. Spain held the mouth of the Mississippi; England had not 

 given up the frontier forts. From the meeting at Mount Vernon followed, 

 first the Annapolis, and then the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia, 

 and one of the arguments for a more perfected union arose through the 

 rivalry between Virginia and New York as to which should obtain the first 

 water route to the west and develop unknown regions for the benefit of 

 the whole United States. Washington was the moving spirit and his fore- 

 sight and greatness in peace are no more forcibly shown than in urging the 

 construction of what, forty years afterwards, became the Erie and the 

 Chesapeake & Ohio canals. 



The war of 1812 hastened the building of the former, but we would go 

 too far afield if we gave even an outline of the efforts of DeWitt Clinton 

 to connect the Great Lakes and the Hudson. The improvement of natural 

 bodies of water through a comparatively level country was cheaper than 

 building roads in a primeval forest, and yet through the connected water- 

 ways that forest was quickly succeeded by the towns and villages which 

 have made the Empire State ; while immigrants poured westward to people 

 the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. Whatever of financial profit or loss there 

 may have been to individuals from the subsequent overbuilding of canals, 

 they were of the utmost economic value to both the state and country. 



Mention should also be made of the Raritan and the Morris canals, con- 

 necting the Delaware and Hudson, the latter built by MaccuUoch in 1830. 

 They opened up the coal fields of Pennsylvania and served to make New 

 York the city which it is to-day. 



The third decade of the nineteenth century witnessed the period of 

 greatest activity in canal building; the fourth, the application of steam 



