"Such has been the progress of railway development," he said, "that if we had a canal to-day from Lake Erie through the Ohio Valley to Beaver, free of toll, we could not afford to put boats on it. It is cheaper to-day to transfer the ore to 50-ton cars, and bring it to our works at Pittsburg over our railway, than it would be to bring it by canal." Turning from artificial to natural waterways in the United States, I find the story of the Mississippi no less instructive. [Illustration: A CARGO BOAT ON THE MISSISSIPPI. [_To face page_ 110. ] This magnificent stream has, in itself, a length of 2,485 miles. But the Missouri is really only an upper prolongation of the same river under another name, and the total length of the two, from mouth to source, is 4,190 miles, of which the greater distance is navigable. The Mississippi and its various tributaries drain, altogether, an area of 1,240,000 square miles, or nearly one-third of the territory of the United States. If any great river in the world had a chance at all of holding its own against the railroads as a highway of traffic it should, surely, be the Mississippi, to which British theorists ought to be able to point as a powerful argument in support of their general proposition concerning the advantages of water over rail-transport. But the actual facts all point in the other direction. The earliest conditions of navigation on the Mississippi are well shown in the following extract from an article published in the _Quarterly Review_ of March 1830, under the heading, "Railroads and Locomotive Steam-carriages":-- "As an example of the difficulties of internal navigation, it may be mentioned that on the great river Mississippi, which flows at the rate of 5 or 6 miles an hour, it was the practice of a certain class of boatmen, who brought down the produce of the interior to New Orleans, to break up their boats, sell the timber, and afterwards return home slowly by land; and a voyage up the river from New Orleans to Pittsburg, a distance of about 2,000 miles, could hardly be accomplished, with the most laborious efforts, within a period of four months. But the uncertain and limited influence, both of the wind and the tide, is now superseded by a new agent, which in power far surpassing the raging torrent, is yet perfectly manageable, and acts with equal efficacy in any direction.... Steamboats of every description, and on the most approved models, ply on all the great rivers of the United States; the voyage from New Orleans to Pittsburg, which formerly occupied four months, is accomplished with ease in fifteen or twenty days, and at the rate of not less than 5 miles an hour."