Fortunately the same hands that make a law may repeal it. And the odious anti-railroad provisions of the navigation law that accompanied the opening of the Panama Canal should be revoked at once. The railroads should be aided and encouraged in the development, through their capital and the use of their connecting land lines as well as their advantageous waterfront terminals in almost all our cities, in developing a waterborne traffic. Such a traffic, devoting itself chiefly, if not exclusively, to the lower, coarser, and slower moving grades of freight would be a tremendous relief to their rails; in the long run probably saving them huge capital expenditures for the construction of third and fourth tracks to relieve their overburdened double-tracks. Congestion on our railroads is not always a question of overcrowded terminals. Take that great, elaborate, and all but economically useless ditch which the state of New York is just completing from the Hudson River at Troy to the foot of Lake Erie at Buffalo--the outgrowth of the once-famous Erie Canal. As a piece of engineering the new Barge Canal is a marvel. Its locks are comparatively few, roomy, marvels of operating mechanism, its fairway is generous--together these give a water pathway large enough for a barge of 2,000 tons burden. Two thousand tons is roughly equal to forty modern freight cars--a fair length train. Two of these barges would have the tonnage equivalent of a full-length modern freight train. Fifty of them would be a genuine relief to the crowded rails of the New York Central's six tracks from Albany to Buffalo. But the New York Central is not permitted to operate barges through the new Erie Canal from Troy to Buffalo. Oh, no! and for that matter, not from New York up the waters of the Hudson to Troy. The Federal regulation takes care of the waters of the Hudson--and keeps them freight-desolate--the sovereign state of New York prevents their passing through the sacred portals of its new $150,000,000 canal. For, truth to tell, the new canal was designed for but two or three real purposes; to keep the port of Buffalo from falling into decay, to find jobs for numerous deserving feeders at the public trough and keep down the local freight rates of the New York Central, which it parallels for its entire length. If it succeeds in these things--and it probably will--the men who control the present destinies of the state government will probably lose no time in worrying over the fact that the canal is practically completed, yet no boats of the modern type for which it was builded have been launched--or even planned. For a traffic not one one-thousandth of that at Panama, a canal of half the size and half the cost has been constructed.