Of objections to either plan there is no end, and there will be no end as long as the subject remains open for discussion. To answer such objections in detail, to search the records for proof in support of one theory or another, is a mere waste of time which can lead to no possible useful result. Among others, for illustration, there has been placed before us a letter from the chief engineer of the Manchester Ship Canal, who is emphatically in favor of a sea-level waterway. It would have been much more interesting and much more valuable to the members of Congress to have received from Mr. Hunter a statement as to why he should have changed his opinions; or why, in 1898, he should have signed the unanimous report of the technical commission in favor of a lock canal, while now he so emphatically sustains those who favor the sea-level project. It is not going too far to say, appealing to the facts of history, that Mr. Hunter may be seriously in error in this matter and may have drawn upon his imagination rather than upon his engineering experience, the same as Mr. Robert Stephenson was in serious error in his bitter opposition to the canal enterprise at Suez. Mr. Hunter, in his letter, argues, among other points, that the lifts of the proposed locks would be without precedent. Without precedent? Why, of course, they would be without precedent. Is not practically every large American engineering enterprise without precedent? Was not the Erie Canal, completed in 1825, without precedent? Were not the first steamboat and the first locomotive without precedent? Were not the Hoosac Tunnel and the Brooklyn Bridge feats of American engineering enterprise without precedent? Without precedent is the great barge canal which the State of New York is about to build, which will mean a complete reconstruction of the existing waterway which connects the ocean with the Great Lakes.[3] All this is without precedent. But it is American. It is progress, and takes the necessary risk to leave the world better, at least in a material way, than we found it. In the proposed deep waterway, which is certain some day to be built to connect the uttermost ends of the Great Lakes with tide-water on the Atlantic, able and competent engineers of the largest experience have designed locks with a lift of 52 feet.[4] That will be without precedent. On the Oswego Canal, proposed as a part of the new barge canal of the State of New York, there will be six locks, two of which will each have a lift of 28 feet,[5] and that will be without precedent, but neither dangerous nor detrimental to navigation interests.