This is properly a national movement, because all interstate and foreign commerce, and the improvements and methods of carrying it on, are subjects for national action. Moreover, while of course the matter of the improvement of the Mississippi River and its tributaries is one which especially concerns the great middle portion of our country, the region between the Alleghenies and the Rockies, yet it is of concern to the rest of the country also, for it can not too often be said that whatever is really beneficial to one part of our country is ultimately of benefit to the whole. Exactly as it is a good thing for the interior of our country that the seaports on the Atlantic and the Pacific and the Gulf should be safe and commodious, so it is to the interest of the dwellers on the coast that the interior should possess ample facilities for the transportation of its products. Our interests are all closely interwoven, and in the long run it will be found that we go up or go down together. Take, for instance, the Panama Canal. If the Mississippi is restored to its former place of importance as a highway of commerce, then the building of the Panama Canal will be felt as an immediate advantage to the business of every city and country district in the Mississippi Valley. I think that the building of that canal will be of especial advantage to the States that lie along the Pacific and the States that lie along the Gulf; and yet, after all, I feel that the advantage will be shared in an only less degree by the States of the interior and of the Atlantic coast. In other words, it is a thoroughly national work, undertaken for and redounding to the advantage of all of us――to the advantage of the Nation as a whole. Therefore I am glad to be able to report to you how well we are doing with the canal. There is bound to be a certain amount of experiment, a certain amount of feeling our way, in a task so gigantic――a task greater than any of its kind that has ever hitherto been undertaken in the whole history of mankind; but the success so far has been astonishing, and we have not met with a single one of the accidents or drawbacks which I freely confess I expected we should from time to time encounter. We, in the first place, laid the foundation for the work by securing the most favorable possible conditions as regard the health, comfort, and safety of the men who were to do it; and now the Canal Zone is in point of health better off than the average district of the same size at home. Then we went at the problem of the actual digging and dam building. For over a year past we have been engaged in making the dirt fly in good earnest, and the output of the giant steam shovels has steadily increased. It is now the rainy season, when work is most difficult on the Isthmus, yet in the month of August last we excavated over a million and two hundred thousand cubic yards of earth and rock, a greater amount than in any previous month.