It would seem that this activity in Lake shipyards must soon supply demands, but such will not be the case for many years to come. While the depression of 1908 has cast its gloom, Lake men cannot see the end of their prosperity. They are in the midst of fortune-making days on the Inland Seas. To-day one of the steel ships of the Lakes is as good as a gold mine, and will continue to be so for a quarter of a century to come. The shipyards are growing each year, but the increase of tonnage is outstripping them, and until cargo and ships are more evenly balanced the owners of vessels on the Great Lakes must be counted among the most fortunate men in the world. It is only natural that these conditions should have developed shipbuilding on the Lakes to a science unparalleled in any other part of the earth. I once had the good fortune to talk with a shipbuilder from the Clyde. He had heard much of the Lakes. He had built ships for them. He had heard of the wonders of shipbuilding in their cities. So he had come across to see for himself. “I had thought that your ships would not compare with ours,” he said. “You build them so quickly that I thought they would surely be inferior to those of the Clyde. But they are the best in the world; I will say that--the best in the world, and you build them like magicians! You lay their keels to-day--to-morrow they are gone!” This is almost true. A ten-thousand-ton leviathan of the Lakes can now be built almost as quickly as carpenters can put up an eight-room house. Any one of several shipyards can get out one of these monsters of marine commerce within ninety days, and the record stands with a ten-thousand-ton vessel that was launched fifty-three days after her keel was laid! One hardly realises what this means until he knows of a few of the things that go into the construction of such a vessel. Take the steamer _Thomas F. Cole_, for instance, launched early in 1907 by the Great Lakes Engineering Works. This vessel is the giant of the Lakes, and is six hundred and five feet and five inches long. She is fifty-eight feet beam and thirty-two feet deep, and in a single trip can carry as great a load as three hundred freight cars, or twelve thousand tons. In her are nine million five hundred thousand pounds of iron and steel! What does this mean? It means that if every man, woman, and child in Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota were to join in carrying this material to a certain place, each person would have to transport one pound. In the mass would be eight hundred thousand rivets, ranging in size from five eighths of an inch to one and one eighth inches in diameter.