President Grant in his message of 1872 advised the Congress to authorize a committee to investigate the various enterprises for the more direct and cheaper transportation of the products of the West and South to the seaboard. The Senate responded by the appointment of a select committee on transportation routes to the seaboard, with ample powers for investigation. Senator Windom, as chairman of this committee, devoted many months to the analysis and interpretation of the great mass of information and counsel submitted, and to the preparation of the report in two octavo volumes, printed in the spring of 1874. Among the novel conclusions of this committee (and some of them are after the lapse of a generation not familiar to all) were: (1) that the power of Congress to regulate commerce among the several states includes the power to aid and facilitate it by the improvement or creation of channels and ways of transportation; Congress has the same right to build railroads as canals: hence, (2) the ownership or control of one or more double-track freight railways; (3) the improvement of our great natural water ways and their connection by canals; (4) particularly the improvement of four great channels at national expense. These were the Mississippi River itself, a route from the upper Mississippi by way of the great lakes, a route from the same river by way of the Ohio and Kanawha, and, last, a route from the Mississippi via the Tennessee; all to be pieced out either by canals or freight roads. At the present writing Congress is just warming up to attack the first of these four great enterprises. As might be supposed, the committee incidentally suggested complete publicity of all interstate railroad classifications and rates, the prohibition of combinations with parallel or competing lines, the receipt for and delivery of grain by quantity, the making it unlawful for railroad officers to be interested in car or freight line companies, and the absolute cessation of stock watering. The proposition of a bureau of commerce to supervise all interstate railroad operations bore fruit twelve years later in the interstate commerce commission. Senator Hoar declared this report to be “the most valuable state paper of modern times.”