While the country was being agitated by the tariff controversy and exceptionally bitter political contests, the New York canals were opened for traffic throughout their entire length (October, 1825). No other single work in the United States has ever had a more beneficial effect on the prosperity of internal trade. The opening of the canals brought to an end what had been the bane of internal commerce for half a century--the excessive cost of freight transportation. Freight rates between Albany and Buffalo were at once reduced 90 per cent and the day of the freighter on the Genesee road was ended. The new canal wrought a complete change in all the rural districts of western New York. Lumber, staves, ashes, grain and vegetables, hitherto unmarketable, were now shipped to the markets of the East; farm values doubted and quadrupled; a stream of people poured into the fertile farming regions around Lake Erie. Not less valuable was the new waterway to the district at its eastern terminus. The laboring population of the growing manufacturing towns reaped immense benefits from the cheaper and better means of subsistence they could now secure, while the shipments of merchandise westward on the canal exceeded in value the receipts of raw produce at tide-water. New York had achieved economic unity at a single stroke. The success of the Erie Canal and the rapid growth of internal trade which followed the adoption of the "American System" caused a demand everywhere for more roads and canals and a widespread agitation in favor of government aid to internal improvements. The federal government gave extensive aid to private and state enterprises in the way of land grants and stock subscriptions, though it did not engage directly in the construction of commercial highways. The individual states embarked in schemes of canal and turnpike building which involved them in debts of millions of dollars. Ohio and Indiana began to construct canals joining the Ohio River to Lake Erie in order to secure the advantage of the new outlet to the East. Pennsylvania, awakened to the danger of the total loss of western trade through the state by the fact that shipments of merchandise to the West were abandoning the wagon roads from Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York in favor of the cheaper route by way of the Erie Canal, began, in 1826, an extensive system of canals to connect the Delaware River with the Ohio River and the Great Lakes. Not to be outdone by their rival states, Maryland and Virginia agreed upon the construction of a canal from Chesapeake Bay to the Ohio River, and on July 4, 1828, President Adams dug the first spadeful of earth to signalize the beginning of the undertaking. Some financiers of Baltimore, dubious of the success of an effort to build a waterway over the difficult route adopted by the promoters of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, withdrew their support from that enterprise, and putting their confidence in a new and almost