The "Pork Barrel" System, with its piecemeal appropriations for local improvements, without any underlying comprehensive plan, as long as it prevails, will block the way to all efficient waterway development, or protection from periodical damage by devastating floods. And it will never be changed until popular indignation and protest breaks the stranglehold that the military caste now has upon this class of legislation in Congress. Their attitude in this whole field of public development is in humiliating contrast with that of the Samurai of Japan when the whole system of government of that nation was reconstructed and reorganized. The Samurai, actuated by a patriotic and self-sacrificing desire to promote the general welfare, surrendered entirely the privileges and prerogatives that they held as a military class, and accepted a system which took from them all power and submerged them in the mass of the people. The military caste of this country apparently think only of their own aggrandizement, and persistently oppose any modifications of an evil system which would in the slightest degree involve a surrender of their autocratic authority or official prestige and power for the general welfare. In this stupendous field of national development, where immediate progress is so vital to the people of the entire country, the stubborn opposition of the military caste is the most serious obstacle in the way of a complete coördination of all the departments of the government in the solution of the whole problem of river regulation and flood control and the upbuilding of a great inland waterway system. Aside from that, there is an additional reason why the present system can never be relied upon for a complete solution of the problem of river regulation. This further difficulty lies in the system under which the military caste is organized. The military system which prevails in all matters administered through the Army, strangles all individual initiative and opinion. It automatically subordinates every engineer in the military service to the mental and personal domination of the chief of the Army engineers, whoever he may be. All original and creative engineering genius is muzzled or chloroformed as soon as it is born. If by any Caesarian operation it chances to come into being it is promptly strangled. Another incurable defect in the military system when applied to civil construction and internal development of the resources of the country, lies in the transfer of engineers from one assignment of duty to another after brief periods of service. This plan is no doubt advisable and possibly necessary in the military service. Its tendency is to bring all Army engineers up to a common general level of ability and experience. It destroys the peculiar originality and genius which can only result from long experience and training in one of the many special fields for which engineers must be developed in civil life.