To build our city we first require lumber. During the 1909 season of navigation about 1,500,000,000 feet of this material will be carried by Lake ships. What this means it is hard to conceive until it is turned into houses. To build a comfortable eight-room dwelling, modern in every respect, requires about 20,000 feet of lumber, and when we divide a billion and a half by this figure we have 75,000 homes, capable of accommodating a population of about 400,000 people. With the thousands of tons of building stone transported by lake each year, the millions of barrels of cement, the cargoes of shingles, sand, and brick, our “City of the Lakes” for 1909 would be as large as Buffalo, Cleveland, or Detroit. But one does not begin fully to comprehend the significance of the enormous commerce of the Great Lakes, and what it means not only to this country but to half of the civilised world, until he begins to figure how long the grain which will be carried by ships during the present year would support this imaginary city of 400,000 adult people. There will pass through the “Soo” canals this year at least 90,000,000 bushels of wheat and 60,000,000 bushels of other grain, besides 7,500,000 barrels of flour, all of which represents the “bread stuff” that is shipped from Lake Superior ports alone. There will, in addition, be shipped by lake at least 50,000,000 bushels from Chicago, Milwaukee, and other ports whose eastbound commerce is not reported at the “Soo.” In short, estimating conservatively from the past four years, it is safe to say that at least 200,000,000 bushels of grain and 11,000,000 barrels of flour will have been transported by the Great Lakes marine by the end of this year’s season of navigation. But what do these figures mean? They seem top-heavy, unwieldly, valuable perhaps to the scientific economist, but of small interest to the ordinary everyday eater of bread. Let us reduce this grain to flour. It takes from four and a half to five bushels of grain for a barrel of flour and dividing by the larger figure our grain would give us 40,000,000 barrels, which, plus the 11,000,000, would make a total of 51,000,000 barrels. Now we come right down to dinner-table facts. At least 250 one-pound loaves of bread can be made from each 196-pound barrel of flour, or a total of 12,750,000,000 from the whole, which would mean at least five loaves for every man, woman, and child of the two and one half billion people who inhabit this globe! In other words, figuring from the reports of food specialists, the grain and flour carried by the ships of the Lakes for one year would give the total population of the earth a food supply sufficient to keep it in life and health for a period of two weeks!