The advantages to the people of the United States of the completed Nicaragua Ship Canal were almost incalculable. The freight-carrying business of the world between the east coast of Asia and Europe was rapidly transferred to American bottoms. The iron manufacturers of Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia were given an opportunity, previously denied them, of marketing the product of their furnaces and foundries on the Pacific Coast of North America. The dwellers in the Mississippi Valley could now send their cotton, meats, and manufactures to trans-Pacific and Antipodean markets, and California redwood and Puget Sound fir and cedar lumber could be sent over all the Northwest. On the Pacific Coast the canal added twenty-five per cent to the productive value of every acre of grain and timber land. The cost of sacking, and half the cost of transporting wheat was saved to the farmer, and the freight upon all machinery and heavy goods brought from the East was greatly lessened. On Puget Sound the construction of a ship canal, costing less than $2,000,000, connecting the fresh waters of Lake Washington with the salt water in Elliott Bay, gave to Seattle such facilities for warehousing, loading, and dry-docking, and such independence of tides and teredos, that a commercial rival of San Francisco was spreading over the hills of the fir-fringed Queen of the New Mediterranean, while at the extreme southwestern corner of the republic the city of bay and climate—San Diego—was rapidly regaining the population and prestige which temporarily slipped from her grasp at the subsiding of the boom which, during 1886 and 1887, enkindled the imagination, and beguiled the judgment, and encrazed with the fever of speculation, the people of Southern California. Even during the dull times which annihilated so many promising fortunes in Southern California, the attractions of Coronado Beach were sufficient to secure for it exemption from the dire distress which overtook other localities. The company owning this enterprise successfully defied not only a bursted boom but the very forces of nature, for they riprapped the beach in front of their hotel, and baffled the Pacific Ocean, which, after gnawing up the lawn and shrubbery which fronted its restless waters, had set its foam-capped legions at work to undermine the foundations of the great ballroom. Parks, avenues, and streets were improved, museums and gardens developed, and races and hops and fishing and boating parties encouraged. Excursions from neighboring cities were organized, the East was flooded with pamphlets praising Coronado, and the pleasure-loving and health-seeking world was in every way reminded that in this land of rare delights it could pick ripe oranges and enjoy surf bathing in midwinter, while Boston was shivering and New York swept with blizzards.