What will be the rate charged for a site? Will it be based on the actual cost of the Canal and its maintenance? Or will the state consider it a business investment like a road or street, and charge the property owners thereon less than the cost of construction, collecting the difference in the general progress? That, too, is a question which calls for considerable study before it can be answered. With the Industrial Canal open, sites available on long leases to business enterprise, and with our tax laws relating to the processes of industry and commerce revised and made more favorable, New Orleans will enter a period of expansion and development on a scale hardly yet dreamed of by her most far-visioned citizens, with enlarged profit and opportunity for all her people. New taxable wealth will be created rapidly. New needs for taxable property will arise. The tax burden on all will be distributed more widely and when contrasted with the earning power of such property will become less and less of a burden. This will be so because the water frontage through which the Canal is being created for the attraction of many enterprises which cannot locate on the river front, is all within the limits of the city of New Orleans. With this Canal in operation, New Orleans will possess to the fullest degree the three great systems of port operation: Public ownership and operation of the river harbor facilities; public ownership of the land and private operation of facilities on the Industrial Canal; and private ownership of the land and private operation of the facilities on the new channel to the sea. No other port in the country has the capacity for this trinity of port systems. No other port possesses such a hinterland as is embraced within the Mississippi Valley, nor so extensive and so complete a system of easy-grade railroads and navigable waterways penetrating its hinterland. No other port holds so strategic a position in the path of the new trade routes connecting the region of greatest productivity with the new markets of greatest promise in Latin-America and the Orient. [Illustration: LOCK GATE There are Ten Like This] CONSTRUCTION COSTS AND CONTRACTORS. Everything is relative. Looking at the total, some may think that the cost of the Industrial Canal is large. So it is--compared with the cost of an irrigation ditch through a 20-acre farm. But comparing the cost with the wealth it is invested to produce--has already begun to produce--it dwindles to a mere percentage. And a comparison of construction costs on the Industrial Canal with similar work done elsewhere during the same time is very much in favor of the former. Witness the following figures shown in the books of the engineering department of the Dock Board: