But it has not always been so with them. "The Astorian" stated, on the 30th of January, 1880, that there were thirty vessels off the bar, unable to enter. The same paper, on the 23d of March, 1880, published this item of news: "Pilots on the bar all agree that, unless some measures are adopted for permanent improvement of the channel, it will not be longer considered safe for vessels to enter or cross out with more than eighteen feet draught of water." "The Astorian" in the same issue also informed us that "Captain Flavel has been making personal inspections of bar-soundings, ... and is himself fully satisfied that it is only a question of very brief time, so rapid and broadcast is the shoaling process, when it will be impossible for deep vessels to cross; the North Channel, along Sand Island from the head, is filling up as fast as does the South Channel"; while "The Oregonian" told us as recently as December, 1880, that "the Gatherer, with railroad-iron for the Northern Pacific Railroad Company, was compelled to lighter four times between Baker's Bay and Kalama, at heavy expense. The Chandos, sailing from this port within the past two weeks, lightered thirteen hundred tons. The A. M. Simpson lightered eleven hundred tons; and the last departure, the Edwin Reed, getting off on a winter rain-flood, scraped over the shoals with all but two hundred and eighty tons of her load, the lightest lighterage of a wooden vessel for many months. The report has gone forth that to reach Portland a ship must be dragged up a hundred miles or more of river over four bad bars, and at the shipping season lighterage at enormous cost is necessary. Naturally enough, we now have no large ships." [Sidenote: _SHIPPING ABUSES AND EXACTIONS._] The abuses of the present system of shipping are many and great, and all on the principle of making hay while the sun shines. Hear a shipmaster who published his experiences in October last: