“National ideals to-day tend toward a large and strong state, with vast external possessions, with a huge army and navy, with an extending trade, and great consequent wealth; and the ideal of education is less toward ‘unprofitable culture’ and more toward subjects that enable men to raise themselves in the world. People now talk more about capital and labor. Formerly there seemed rather more faith in the power of reason, rather more hope of progress to be secured by political change. Altogether there seemed rather more of a sanguine spirit formerly. Mankind must never cease to cherish and follow the dream of that golden age, which at one time they believed to lie in the past, but which for some centuries had been supposed to glimmer in the future. They must never forget that hope. But the golden age seemed nearer in 1850 than it does now.” Footnote 55: The late Cushman K. Davis, United States senator from Minnesota. Footnote 56: In 1902 Canada began to emulate the history of the United States, and planned for the building of two more transcontinental railways. She could inflict no greater blow to the United States. V. also Chap. V, Vol. IV; “The Pathways of the Future.” Footnote 57: Engineers disagree as to the possibility of making a ship-canal of the great highway of the Mississippi; but engineers have always disagreed about the doing of great things, and then have always done them. It is likely that the dream of that shrewd merchant-explorer, Louis Joliet, will eventually be realized, and the Chicago drainage-canal will in that case attain a great importance. Indeed, inland-water transportation may be upon the eve of a great development. Thus, in December, 1900, there was organized a canal company for the purpose of navigating the Red River of the North, of improving the channel by dredging, putting in locks and reservoirs, to regulate that historic stream into conditions virtually those of a canal. Another curious proposition to reach Congress in the same year was a bill for the purpose of building a ship-canal between Lake Erie and the Ohio River, an enterprise which would have great significance in the coal and iron trade. This canal would follow the course of La Salle on his first journey from the Great Lakes—the old south-bound war-trail of the Six Nations. Geography, of all things, seems to repeat itself. No one may tell what new importance this canal proposition may attain, though it may be dormant for a time. Early in the year 1901 the leading journals of Germany were discussing the prospects of a canal from Chicago to the Atlantic Ocean, and held the enterprise practicable.