The isthmian canal is but a part of the greater American waterways project. As soon as this is finished it is possible that the United States will start in a large way with the project of the artificial canalization of the Mississippi with its 16,000 miles of already navigable waters and a drainage basis of 1,280,000 square miles. The cutting-through of an ocean-ship canal to the Great Lakes will make seaport towns of the Canadian cities on the Lakes Ontario, Erie, and Superior. The Saskatchewan and the Red River can be canalized for 1,000 miles, and a short haul from Winnipeg will open the whole Saskatchewan valley from near the foot-hills of the Rocky Mountains--downstream, but for this short portage--all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, and thence to Panama and the Pacific ports. Every transcontinental freight-rate in Canada and the United States will be reduced, and perhaps some in the middle interior. As this great southern movement starts up the industries of the southern states will receive a new impulse. The Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea will spring into a new life, together with the West Indies and Central America and the vast and fertile interior drained by the Orinoco and the Amazon. CENTRAL AND SOUTHERN AMERICA. But there are no countries which will hear the call of the canal so nearly and clearly as those of Central and Southern America. It is astonishing how that forty-mile wide land barrier between the two oceans has isolated all the western shore of the continent. The Panama Canal Railroad has done very little to modify the situation. The Pacific coast of America has looked westwards over its waste of waters, and has scarcely been reached by the industrial and economic forces at work behind it in the Old and New Worlds. Its trade has been carried on mostly with Europe, and especially England, in sailing vessels that have plodded round the distant Horn. An interesting example of this geographical and commercial detachment of the west coast of Central and South America is furnished by the port of Mazatlan in Western Mexico. From this place there are considerable exports of logwood and mahogany. But thirty times as much of this lumber has gone to Europe as to the east of the American continent. On the opposite or eastern side of Mexico is Tampico, where the returns of trade are just the reverse, the United States being the largest customer for its exports. Despite the old Spanish paved roads across the isthmus at Panama, by which the silver and pearls of Peru and the Pacific were conveyed to Nombre de Dios and Porto Bello, for shipment to Spain, despite the sixty years of the little Panama Railway, the American continent even in its narrowest parts has been something like an impenetrable screen between east and west. Four centuries of continued agitation and effort to get the water