To the west of Montreal several canals have been completed to overcome the rapids of the St. Lawrence, the last of which is the renowned Falls of Niagara, and which our grandsires held to be so insuperable as to bar settlement on the upper lakes. These works are a marked feature of Canadian enterprise, and in themselves an important chapter in the history of canal construction. Nowhere in the world, on a line of navigation, are such locks to be seen. Those of the Lachine Canal are two hundred and seventy-five feet in length, forty-five feet wide, with twelve feet of water in the sills, so constructed that, without interruption to traffic, they may be increased to fourteen feet. The enlargement of the whole navigation of the St. Lawrence, now in progress, is on a similar scale. It is by the central and commanding position which these works have created for Montreal that the city has attained its present supremacy. For a time Quebec enjoyed to the full extent the control of the ocean shipping trade, but the day the channel was formed through the flats of Lake St. Peter for the passage of seagoing vessels the monopoly was broken and the trade diverted. The City of Quebec has long complained that its commerce was languishing, among other causes, from the persistent efforts of Montreal to control it. The deepening of the channel between the two cities has accomplished more than was even hoped for by its far-seeing projectors, for most of the seagoing steamships steam past Quebec, to find at Montreal the point of transfer for their western freight, and the point where it is most convenient to receive a cargo. There is a recorded saying of the Hon. John Neilson, a well known public man of forty years back, that there are two advantages Montreal could not take away from Quebec: the Citadel and the tide. Evidently meaning by the former that tourists would always visit the city to see what only could there be found, and that Quebec, by constructing tidal docks, had the means of bringing to her harbour vessels which, from their draught, could not ascend the river to Montreal. The persistent, well-directed efforts of Montreal, however, have been to concede no such advantages.