The gateway from the Gulf of Mexico to the great central valley of this country opens into a region so vast that the area comprised within the watershed of the Mississippi and its tributaries embraces 41 per cent of the entire United States. This gateway opens into a great waterway system capable of being made continuously navigable all the year around through 20,000 miles of navigable waterways and commerce-carriers. The gateway from the Gulf opens to a country of greater potential agricultural wealth than any other section of the earth's surface of the same area. The lower Mississippi Valley has well been styled the "Sugar-Bowl" of the continent. The State of Louisiana alone is larger in area by 10,000 square miles than the combined area of Belgium, Holland, and Denmark. It is capable of sustaining a larger population and producing vastly more wealth than those three countries combined. If you draw a line straight north from the southernmost point of Texas to the northern line of Oklahoma, and then turn and go straight east, projecting the northern line of Oklahoma past Cairo, Illinois, to the Tennessee River, following up the Tennessee River to the northeast corner of Mississippi, and then follow the eastern boundary line of Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, you have included within these extreme boundaries a territory as large as the whole German Empire. It is a territory possessing greater natural wealth and possibility of development than the German Empire, _provided_ the great problems of water control and river regulation are solved in such a way as to promote the highest development of this region for the benefit of humanity, and _provided further_ that the Coast region of this territory is protected not only from the floods of the river, but from the storms originating in the Gulf of Mexico. Protection from those storms requires the construction of a great dike similar to the dikes of Holland that will hold out the waters of the Gulf not only at their normal height, but will also hold them back when they attain the abnormal height which at rare intervals results from the hurricanes or great storms from the Gulf of Mexico, such as that which overwhelmed Galveston. Lafcadio Hearn, in "Chita," has described a Gulf Storm better than it will ever again be described. He prefaced the story of that storm with a picture of the havoc wrought by Nature's forces--the ceaseless charging of the "Ocean's Cavalry," that is quoted because it so clearly portrays the necessity for bulwarks of defense built in the spirit of military defenses.