So the steel container, which H. W. Kirchner of St. Louis has designed, came into play. It carries merchandise not only from New Orleans to Birmingport (just below Birmingham) but, atop of the coal, back to New Orleans again. The inventor has had no joy whatever in this very informal trial of his device. He would prefer to have his containers handled and placed in a more orderly and systematic fashion. Yet the fact remains that a beginning has been made in the actual use of the only practical binding force yet brought forward which looks to a physical linking of the several different arms of freight transport. Any firm believer not only in the theory of correlated transportation but also in the high values to be achieved by its practical application in this country cannot help having a joy in this Warrior River experiment, an experiment which sooner or later is to be extended to the similar barge service which the United States Government has now succeeded in establishing upon the Mississippi. It already has been shown on the Warrior River line that the container can, and does, cut labor costs at terminals all the way from sixty-five cents to four cents a ton--the time for unloading from twelve to twenty-four hours down to but one or two, at the most. * * * * * There is coming to-day in this country--slowly, but very surely--a reversal of the old-time tradition that the inland waterway is _per se_ a competitor of the railroad. Many years ago the railroads themselves showed how small a figure a river or canal, always more or less subject to seasonal or weather influences, was to the steel highway as a competitor, while the attempts that have been made since then--and generally at large capital expenditure--to bring about the resurrection of the inland waterway as a competitor of the railroad have so far proved abortive. But to regard the inland waterway as supplementary to the railroad, or the railroad as supplementary to the inland waterway--it is merely a choice of phrasings--is a very different story indeed. True it is that the statute laws to-day pronounce sternly against such a sensible, economic solution of a large phase of our American transport problem. True it is that a good many other keen business men still can see the waterway in no other light than as a club over the railroad. True it is that a good many otherwise sagacious railroad executives can see the waterway as nothing but an obsolete agent of transport or as a foolish dream of visionary idealists. Yet the fact remains that the waterway does have its place in transport. The railroad has a place, and in intelligent analysis these places dovetail somehow, somewhere. They do not conflict. And the sooner realization is made of this, the better--for all of us.