The great canal at Sault Ste. Marie which has caused this prodigious development of the lake shipping has been under constant construction and reconstruction for almost half a century. It had its origin in a gift of 750,000 acres of public lands from the United States Government to the State of Michigan. The State, in its turn, passed the lands on to a private company which built the canal. This work was wholly unsatisfactory, and very wisely the Government took the control of this artificial waterway out of private hands and assumed its management itself. At once it expended about $8,000,000 upon the enlargement and improvement of the canal. Scarcely was it opened before the ratio at which the traffic increased showed that it would not long be sufficient. Enlarged in 1881, it gave a capacity of from fourteen feet, nine inches to fifteen feet in depth, and with locks only four hundred feet in length. Even a ditch of this size proved of inestimable value in helping vessels to avoid the eighteen feet drop between Lake Superior and Lake Huron. By 1886 the tonnage which passed through the canal each year exceeded 9,000,000, and then for the first time this great waterway with a season limited to eight or nine months, exceeded in the volume of its traffic the great Suez canal. But shippers at once began to complain of its dimensions. Vessels were constantly increasing both in length and in draught, and the development of the great iron fields gave assurance that a new and prodigious industry would add largely to the size of the fleet, which up to that time had mainly been employed in carrying grain. Accordingly the Government rebuilt the locks until they now are one hundred feet in width, twenty-one feet deep, and twelve hundred feet long. Immediately vessels were built of a size which tests even this great capacity, and while the traffic through De Lessep's famous canal at Suez has for a decade remained almost stationary, being 9,308,152 tons, in 1900, the traffic through the "Soo" has increased in almost arithmetical proportion every year, attaining in 1901, 24,696,736 tons, or more than the combined tonnage of the Suez, Kiel, and Manchester canals, though the "Soo" is closed four months in the year. In 1887 the value of the iron ore shipments through the canal was $8,744,995. Ten years later it exceeded $30,000,000. Meanwhile it must be remembered that the Canadian Government has built on its own side of the river very commodious canals which themselves carry no small share of the Lake Superior shipments. An illustration of the fashion in which superior facilities at one end of a great line of travel compel improvements all along the line is afforded by the fact that since the canal at the "Soo" has been deepened so as to take vessels of twenty-one feet draught with practically no limit upon their length, the cry has gone up among shippers and vessel men for a twenty-foot channel from Duluth to the sea. At present there are several